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Shopping
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Mombasa is a good city for
shopping
, with a generally wide choice, and fewer hassles as you window-shop than in Nairobi. Once you know where to go for crafts, the business of buying souvenirs improves markedly. For cloth, Mombasa is blessed with Biashara Street.
The main tourist street, as you'll soon discover, is the stretch of Moi Avenue between the Tusks and Digo Road - a number of the retail businesses here are housed in premises going back to the early twentieth century. However, it's hard to take in the architecture when the pavement is lined with souvenir stalls. Sisal baskets, soapstone, beadwork and fake ebony carvings make up eighty percent of the wares. Those at the Digo Road end of Moi Avenue tend to be the most aggressive at touting their wares, and getting past without stopping is not easy while, if you do halt, making cool decisions can be fraught. The line of stalls on Chembe Road seems to be in something of a backwater, and they're more fun to deal with. If you're buying crafts in Mombasa, whatever else you do, first go and have a look at Haria's Gift Shop on Moi Avenue, near the Tusks (Mon-Sat 9am-6pm; credit cards accepted). They consistently offer good deals and you may even be able to get things here more cheaply than on the street. Labeka, also on Moi Avenue (Mon-Sat 8.30am-5.30pm), is another good store for browsing, with sensible prices and a pleasant, hassle-free environment.
The usual rules apply when
bargaining
- don't start the ball rolling if you're not in the mood and never offer a price you're not prepared to pay. If you want quite a few items, it's worth browsing for a well-stocked stall and then, as you reach one near-agreement after another with the stallholder, add a new item to your collection. This way you should be able to buy well-finished
vyondo
(sisal baskets) in the range of Ksh300-400, small soapstone items for Ksh50-100, and bracelets and necklaces for a similar price. It's impossible to estimate what you'll pay for carvings as the price depends as much on the workmanship as on the size of the piece. If you expressly
don't
want to purchase ebony (the wood is increasingly rare), you'll run into some amusing conversational one-way streets with stallholders who are a dab hand at "proving" their lumps of dyed acacia wood are ebony. Other useful information
for tourists (each section contains more specific sub-sections): |
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Kenya,
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