30th June - Imo

 Today was Watamu day. The journey up the coast passed surprisingly quickly, and we soon arrived at the Watamu Snake Farm (which I would describe as more of a sanctuary). We were introduced one by one to each of the snakes. As the guide slowly worked his way up the venom scale, the glass that separated us seemed increasingly more fragile. We did, however, handle some of the friendlier snakes, and Daphne even had the pleasure of being pissed on. Snake wee is surprisingly viscous. Her delight is pictured below. 

We got to watch certain snakes be ‘milked’, which is not as weird as it sounds. More venomous snakes were taken by their handlers and their fangs pressed through a membrane in order to extract their venom into a funnel. This venom is then used to produce anti-venom. The production process involves horses being injected with the venom and their tolerance gradually built up, so that we might take their blood and reduce it down to the antibodies for our medical use. I found this really interesting. 

For lunch, we headed to the Lichthaus, a really cool spot on the water’s edge, with nets that sat just over the water. We were famished by this point, and the food did not disappoint, nor did the overpriced jewellery shop.

Our next stop was a recycling plant. They showed us their ‘trash collection’, which was a pretty horrifying array of various plastics, piled high in a corner of their plant - designed to shock, and it did. Picture a scene from 2008 Pixar masterpiece ‘Wall-E’. We were shown the machinery used to re-purpose the plastic, and took a cheeky look in the gift shop. This made the work we do on beach clean-ups more visceral and equally tragic. 

Since we were staying the night in Watamu, the next stop was our AirBnB! We eventually found it and settled in for the evening. Unfazed by the rain, we got ourselves sorted out and went out for supper at Ocean Sports Bar. We didn’t quite anticipate how upmarket this would be; it’s safe to say our pre-organised and pre-exchanged ‘shocking shirts’ did not make the classy impression that the other diners would have preferred. And so we began ‘shocking shirt’ night with a disproportionately tasty meal, and a pint of Pimms. The rest is history.