Octopus

Mombasa
Originally uploaded by sweis.

We stayed at an amazing apartment on Nyali beach in Mombasa for a long weekend. I woke up and ran barefoot the first morning we were there. The hawkers were already lined up outside, willing to stand there the whole day for the chance to sell us a trinket worth 80 cents. On one end of the beach there were six or seven camels standing around waiting to give rides to children and tourists.

The beach was on a bay surrounded by a reef that broke most of the tide. Behind the reef was calm and shallow, but full of seaweed and sea urchins. There was what looked like a large rock out by the reef and I decided to swim out to it.

The water was shallow enough that I could walk part of the way, but the distance was a lot longer than I thought. I swam for a while and had to stop to rest a few times. Closer to the reef, it became shallow enough to walk again.

It was low-tide, and the reef was exposed. There were starfish trapped in tide pools. There was another man on the reef hunting something with a spear and putting it in a sack. I asked him what he was looking for. He reached in the bag to show me. I expected a starfish or a crab, but he pulled out a huge octopus instead.

I could see the rock wasn't really a rock and was actually made of metal. The octopus hunter told me it was the engine block of a Singaporean freighter that ran aground thirty years ago. He asked me how I got to the reef. I said that I swam. He clicked his tongue and said "is good", then went back to hunting octopi.