03-Nov-2002 -- I stumbled on www.confluence.org last night while surfing the web from my house in Malindi on the Kenyan coast. I was surprised that there was only one Confluence recorded for all of Kenya. From Malindi, it's only about a 40 minutes' drive to 3°S 40°E, so I convinced my wife to make it a Sunday outing.

The Confluence we photographed today is less than a kilometre walk from the Mambrui-Marafa road. There are plenty of footpaths to approach it through the surrounding bush and farms homesteads. We ended up walking back to the main road a different way than we came. It's probably easiest to leave the car at one of the footpaths due south of the Confluence and then just zigzag your way north with a GPS.

The locals were friendly, as virtually everywhere in Kenya. People were however suspicious that we were coming to demarcate and grab land. I spent some time trying to explain to one farmer what I was doing with this funny instrument in my hand (a GPS).

I think it would have taken more than a quick visit for "3°S 40°E", let alone my motives, to make sense. But as we say in Kiswahili, "hakuna matata".

As would be expected, there is nothing remarkable about the confluence point in itself. It's on the edge of a fairly large, but altogether ordinary bush.

This is fertile country. Excellent, inexpensive vegetables can be purchased east of the turnoff in the village of Mogadishu (the name comes from the Somali refugees who used to live there). Further west down the main road, is the intriguing Marafa depression (Hell's Kitchen).