Wish You Were Here - Mombasa

So, it’s occurred to me that some of you might have ended up very sad to here about my travels and not get to come along yourselves.  As a result, I’ve decided to start a Wish You Were Here section, so that you can recreate the travelling experience for yourself at home!

Mombasa is a coastal town in Kenya, where the Kenyan people go on holiday, and rumoured to be a paradise.  Having spent a day or so there, I can now tell you how to get the perfect experience for yourself at home!

1.  Turn on the oven as high as it will go, open the oven door and close the door to the kitchen.  Feel the stifling heat sink into you.

2.  Every 15 minutes, throw a cup of rancid water into the oven.  This will produce a good amount of claggy humidity to compliment the heat.  Do not open a window - there is no wind in Mombasa.  For a really authentic experince, get water which smells of sewers.

3.  Sprinkle cat litter on the floor and wander about on it.  Make sure you crush some glass and condom wrappers into the dirt too!

4.  You’ll need some other people for this next step.  If you have lots of “friends” (ideally people you do not wish to spend time with) get them to come around and squash into the kitchen with you.  Ensure that once every 15 seconds one of them shouts something at you, whistles, makes kissing noises or starts up a random conversation with no real end.  Everyone should, at some point, try to sell you a safari.

5.  If you can’t find friends to do this, put an offensive sign on your window aimed at upsetting your young male neighbours, and allow them to hammer on the glass and shout at you.

6.  Now for the authentic smell!  You’ve already got the water, but now you need the fruit.  Get a sack of pineapples and one of mangoes, then put them in the oven for a bit so they go all soft and gooey.  Trample them into the floor, and cover yourself with any remaining juice to attract lots of flies.

7.  For good measure, inject some vodka into a mango to recreate the fermenting effect of the sun, and try to eat it.

8.  Turn off the lights and the water, as for more than 50% of the day these will not work.

There you go!  The authentic Mombasa experience!

As a side note, Mummy has decided to create an account for herself here, so she can write about things which are a bit too big for my tiny brain.  She says that writing as a zebra the whole time closes off many avenues she would wish to use.  Look out for the user who posted an entry at the very bottom!

- Greg