Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar.
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Travel
Today I turned thirty. I spent most of it wandering the streets of central Bangkok. A new decade, a new part of the world for me.
The day of my previous birthday, I was pulling into Juba—the soon-to-be-independent capital of South Sudan—on the bus from Kampala.
Juba to Bangkok. Of what I saw today, the two cities couldn’t be more different. Only the lean-to houses lining a railway track resembled something similar.
A year ago, I was expecting a struggle to begin a career in the world of the news photographer. A year later, I had lived that struggle through some of the biggest stories of 2011: South Sudan’s referendum and subsequent independence; the war in Libya; drought in the Horn of Africa, seen from Kenya and Somalia; and finishing up with the elections in DR Congo.
Now, I can’t help but wonder what I’m doing here, a world away from all that. It’s become hard to take a holiday.
I was taking the “cheap” route to Thailand from Kenya, leaving on New Year’s Day, with more than a little hangover and sleep deprivation.
Nairobi - Dubai - Hong Kong - Bangkok. Two days of traveling, four airports, three planes, and a world of difference.
Hong Kong International. “No sitting” said the sign on the travelator. I was ready to drop. This was first time I had been so far east, and was eager to explore what was the other side of the glass. The round hills rising up. The harbour. But that would have to wait for another trip.
In the early hours of Saturday October 1st, a French lady was kidnapped from Manda island, in the Lamu archipelago, two weeks after a British lady was kidnapped and her husband shot dead, further north up the coast towards Somalia.
I got the call on that Saturday morning, and was asked to take the first flight down. This was a different type of journalism to everything else I have hitherto done.
Arriving in Lamu, nobody on the island could believe that “the Somali pirates” could be so “audacious” to come to Lamu. It was hard to believe that the Kenyan government, police and coast-guard had not stepped up security following the previous kidnapping.
Local hoteliers had themselves organised an aeroplane to fly up the coast and try to track the kidnappers as they fled towards Somali waters. The coastguard did not have a boat, it was rumoured.
The fate of Marie Dedieu is still unknown, but the impact on tourism in Lamu will be enormous. Over eighty per cent of the island relies on the tourism industry, which immediately sunk as news trickled in. Over two hundred people that Saturday cancelled their holiday to Lamu. It will take a long time to rebuild the reputation of the island; the Kenyan tourism indusyry is still recovering from the hit it took following the post-election violence several years ago.
The last time I came here, I came for two or three days. I left ten days later. It was easy to fall in love with the place. It will be harder now.
Driving from Marsabit, crossing the Chalbi desert, we got lost at night, in the vast expanse of black. We were headed to a small town where we could spend the night, but there are few lights in this part of the world, and once we lost the track, it wasn’t easy to find. Our faith was in the driver. In the end, he turned up trumps.