Travels in Africa Kenya March 1964 Mombasa was just as exotic as its name implies. It has a long history of Arab trading dhows riding the trade winds between there and all those other exotic ports around the north of the Indian Ocean, and of course the slave trade, which still goes on I’m told. The Arab traders live behind heavy timber doors strapped with wrought iron and studded with brass – it’s easy to imagine that there’d be all sorts of secret and exotic goings on behind such doors. Not so secret, but definitely exotic (at least to a prairie boy) was the cheap hotel I stayed in. Downstairs was a favorite pub for the British troops stationed there. Upstairs was a brothel where they took the bar girls, so there were lots of exotic comings and goings all night long, and with paper-thin walls nothing was secret…. I hung around the port area for a couple of days, watching the trading dhows loading and unloading all manner of bags and boxes of goodness knows what – from pungent herb