Lamu

It's been two days, but here's more about Lamu. It is one of the few Swahili settlements that has been continuously inhabited for the last 800 years or so. The town is built mainly out of locally quarried coral rock (old coral reef that had petrified and been uplifted). On the oldest buildings, this means that the chunks of rock are cemented together and you can see the various textures and colors as you walk along the walls. Newer constructions use cinderblocks created from ground up coral rock, and it's interesting to see buildings with 4 stories, each added in a different building style.
The streets are paved stone and very narrow- you can usually reach out and almost touch both sides. Except for the main street one row in from the waterfront, none of the lanes are straight for more than a block. They wind around with no discernible pattern, but luckily it's not easy to get lost- the city's not so big that you can't reorient by heading back towards the water. The confusion seem inconvenient until you realize how much cooler the narrow lanes keep the city during the hot late mornings.
There are no cars in Lamu- they wouldn't fit on the streets. Transportation is by foot, donkey or boat. There are thousand of donkeys (on the whole of the island), so much so that Lamu is famous for it's donkey sanctuary which provides veterinary health services and cares for retired donkeys.
The best thing about Lamu is hard to describe. When I was taking pictures I felt the same way- nothing I took could really accurately capture the feel of the city. Maybe because it is much less influenced by tourist resorts, Lamu has a feel of community that was absent elsewhere on the coast. I loved that people on the street greeted us, even when they weren't trying to sell us things. Without cars and modern construction, it feels like a slice of Swahili culture that is struggling but still managing to survive the forces of modernization and globalization.