The path from Pate to Siyu is a slightly tricky eight kilometres. Having set off in the right direction, the first half-hour is fairly straightforward; if in doubt, bear right. You come to a crossroads (easily missed unless you look backwards) and turn right. This narrow red dirt path soon broadens into a track known as the barabara ya gari (the "motor highway" - there was once a car); it takes you to a normally dry tidal inlet where you veer left a little before continuing straight on through thick bush for another hour to reach Siyu.

 

Wherever the bush on either side is high enough you may come across gigantic spiders' webs strung across the path. The matching spiders are brightly coloured, non-hairy, and merely waiting for insects, but they are nevertheless intimidating. Fortunately, they have the sense to build their webs high up and well out of the way. SIYU is even less well documented than Pate. Still less accessible by sea, the town was a flourishing and unsuspected centre of Islamic scholarship from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and apparently something of a sanctuary for Muslim intellectuals and craftsmen. While Lamu, Pate and other trading towns were engaged in political rivalry and physical skirmishing, Siyu never had its heart in commerce or maritime activities, and never attracted much Portuguese attention. Instead, there was enormous devotion to Koran-copying, book-making, text illumination , and cottage industries like the woodcarving and leatherwork for which it's still famous locally. Siyu sandals are said to be absolutely the best, though plastic flip-flops have forced almost all the makers out of business. Siyu carved doors are among the most beautiful of all Swahili doors, with distinctive guilloche patterns and inlays of ground shell.

The sources of wealth and stability for Siyu's florescence are a little mysterious, but the town's agricultural base obviously supported it well and it was probably the largest settlement on the island in the early nineteenth century, with up to 30,000 inhabitants. In 1873, the British vice consul in Zanzibar could still describe it as "the pulse of the whole district".

These days you wouldn't know it. Less than 4000 people live here, and signs of the old brilliance are hard to find. Siyu lost its independence and presumably much of its artistic flair when the sultan of Zanzibar's Omani troops first occupied the fort in 1847 - though it was twenty years before the Omanis were able to hold it for more than a brief spell. Built in the early nineteenth century (no one knows for sure by whom), Siyu Fort is the town's most striking building and indeed, in purely monumental terms, the most imposing building on the whole island. Substantially renovated, it is one of the few surviving traces of the glory days. It's freely accessible, though watch out for dangers like the well and the unstable walls. Around the outskirts of Siyu on the south side are a number of quite impressive tombs . The big domed tomb with porcelain niches dates from 1853.

Most of Siyu's houses today conform to the "open-box" plan typical of the Kenyan coast: yellowish mud with a ridged makuti roof, open at each end. These houses stand, each on its own, with no real streets to connect them so, although it's larger than Pate, Siyu feels far more like a village. The cultural isolation of these communities from each other, a separateness which continues to this day, is easily appreciated after arriving in Siyu from Pate. There are still few buibuis here, but there's much less jewellery in evidence and the atmosphere is altogether less severe.

For accommodation , it helps if you've had a word with the museum people in Lamu.