Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [7]
Tuesday, October 1
And So We Stepped into the steamy morning heat of Mombasa, pleased to be back on solid ground. Our destination for the evening was the Driftwood Beachclub Hotel, a stylish but conspicuously underutilized establishment standing on the Indian Ocean at Malindi. A vehicle from the hotel was waiting to whisk us up the coast to Malindi. Our principal task for the day was simply to get in position to fly on to Dadaab and a big CARE refugee camp the next day, but we had much to do in the meanwhile.
First we drove to a beach hotel north of Mombasa where CARE people from all over Africa had gathered for a conference to thrash out a new five-year plan. There we dropped off David Sanderson, who was to address the conference before flying back to London, and picked up Nick Southern, CARE’s regional manager for Kenya, whom I had met in London, as you will recall, and who was to be our host and protector for the next five days. An old Africa hand, Nick has been in Kenya for most of the past 15 years and knows the country inside out.
With Nick collected, we resumed our journey up the coast, through a lush, tropical landscape of palm groves and endless sisal plantations (sisal is used to make rope, I was told) to a small resort called Watamu.
Watamu was tranquil to the point of being comatose. There were several good-sized hotels and associated businesses—diving shops and the like—but a decided paucity of holidaymakers. “Tourism has really taken a beating here,” Nick said, “especially the coastal resorts. If people want to see lions and giraffes, they still have to come to some place like Kenya, but if all they want is a beach holiday then they go to lots of other places.”
For a decade up to the mid-1990s, Kenya was a hot destination. International visitor numbers hit 850,000 in 1995, but then slumped to under 500,000 in 1997 amid a welter of bad publicity. Nearly everybody you meet can tell you some unnerving story about visitors coming to an unhappy end. Before I even came to Kenya I was told three different versions of a story about a German tourist who was either walking on a beach, sitting at an outdoor café or in a car at a traffic light with his arm out the window when someone lopped the arm off with a machete and ran off with the attached Rolex. The story is untrue, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that people believe it.
“When people hear these things and then someone says, ‘Oh and by the way you have to take malaria tablets, too,’ a lot of them decide just to go to Spain,” Nick said. “It’s a shame because Kenya’s got so much going for it—beautiful countryside, lovely people, extraordinary wildlife, wonderful climate, great beaches. I mean, look,” he said and made a sweeping gesture across what was a setting of incomparable splendor: wide beach, nodding palms, bright sun, sparkling water.
We took a creaky glass-bottomed boat operated by two keen young men out to the reef about a quarter of a mile offshore and spent an hour admiring the large and colourful shoals of fish. “Virtually the whole of the coast is reef like this,” Nick said. “And they actually look after it pretty conscientiously. For all they do wrong, the Kenyans manage wildlife very well.” He gave a slight apologetic shrug. “You’re seeing a lot of bad things this week. I thought it might be nice to see something good.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“And the next thing,” he went on, “is really good. Have you ever heard of the Gedi ruins?”
“No,” I said without having to think.
“Not many people have. I think you’ll be impressed.”
The Gedi ruins are inland from Watamu and down a winding track through enclosing overgrowth. From the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries Gedi was a thriving but oddly secretive community hidden away in a jungly setting in what was then a remote nowhere along the coast between Malindi and Mombasa. The inhabitants, who were Muslim, traded with people from all over the world. Archaeologists have found beads from Venice, coins from China,