By Bob Van Leer

  (LAMU, KENYA, East Africa, Feb. 10, 1995) - This morning our ship,Renaissance V, anchored off Lamu, the northernmost town in Kenya, after a 127 mile trip from Mombasa. The ship was unable to cross the shallow bar and parties were taken ashore by the ship's launch and a Zodiac.

  Betty rested on the ship and I took a dhow tour past Lamu to a tiny village named Matondoni where dhows are made. The heat, even on the water, was oppressive. The water temperature was similar to bath water. Dhows are traditional Arab boats propelled by triangular sails. Many are now also equipped with motors.

  Arab influence is strong all along this coast as it was subject to the sultan of Zanzibar. Zanzibar was part of the sultanate of Oman on the Persian Gulf until independence for Kenya in 1963.

  Matondoni is a village of about 400 located in a mangrove swamp. There is no electricity or running water and no enclosed boat shops. Dhows are built with hand tools on the sand under palm trees. A palm-thatched screen may be set up over the boat for protection from the sun.

  One boat we saw under construction must have been about 50 feet long. The hand tools themselves were primitive. We watched a boat builder drilling holes with a drill that gained its rotation by a violin-bow sort of arrangement with the bow-string looped around the drill which rotated the drill as the bow was moved from side to side.

  Nevertheless, they were building sturdy, solid boats. Planking was of mahogany, bent by heat. Ribs were of mangrove. We were told that mangrove couldn't be shaped, so the boat builder had to find mangrove of about the shape he wanted and put it into finished form by shaping it with an adze. Almost all of the buildings in the village had palm-thatched roofs, which we were told lasted about three years. Water was from wells. Gutters in the ground ran with raw sewage.

  After a tour of the boat building village, we returned to Lamu, a larger town that would qualify as a city. It is the oldest occupied city in Kenya and was a prosperous town until the turn of the century. But, according to the information given us, the economy of the island rapidly declined with the abolition of slavery in 1907 and has only recently increased a little with tourism starting to develop. The Swahili coastal city-states all had a slave-based economy until the turn of the 20th century.

  In the whole city and island named Lamu, there is only one vehicle, a Landrover owned by the District Commissioner, the chief government officer. And there is only one road wide enough for a vehicle to drive on.

  When we returned to Lamu from Matondoni, most stores were shutting down for religious purposes. This is a Muslim city and this is the first week of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. Muslims take no food from sunup to sundown.

  We returned to the ship and about 4:00 p.m. the ship set sail for Zanzibar, the fabled spice island that is now part of Tanzania, 248 nautical miles south.