THE COAST

Imagine a white sandy beach two kilometres long. Several hundred metres out to sea is a coral reef with waves breaking over it. The temperature is about 30 C throughout the year. Water temperatures aren't much lower. Anchored off the shore are several dug-out outrigger canoes. The beach is almost empty. Fifty metres from the beach, along a private path is a large single story house. It has a huge veranda, part of it shaded from the tropical sun. A large folding door opens up the entire living room to the sea breezes. You sit in a lounge chair reading a good book and looking out over the Indian ocean.

There were two things in Kenya that I could enjoy repeatedly, without forgetting what a privilege it was to have them. One was watching the sun set over the far side of the Great Rift Valley from our living room window. The other was our annual, or semi-annual trips to the Coast.

The Kenya Coast has a long and extremely interesting history. Arabs have settled and traded there since the seventh century. Their Dhows still sail down from the Persian Gulf when the monsoon in blowing down the coast, and return when the monsoon reverses. The Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century, and eventually built a huge fort at the entrance to Mombasa harbour. Fort Jesus is one of the few reminders of over a century of rule by the Portuguese. We never worried much about the history. We went to relax and have fun.

Our family stayed in several places on the coast. We stayed some at Mizpah, a group of somewhat run-down cottages towards the end of the beautiful Diani beach. It was a place to stay while we enjoyed the beach. We camped several times. I remember once going on a two week camping trip to the coast with five of us in our Datsun station wagon. I don't know how the car survived, but we enjoyed our trip. The nicest places that we stayed were private cottages on the beach that we rented for one to two weeks at a time. The one I described at the start was Diani House, owned by the Archer family, an architect in Nairobi.

Diani House was on the best part of Diani beach. The house had enough beds to sleep at least ten people. A cook, night watchman, and yard-boy were included for a price of 800 shillings ($70) a day. We would usually get several families together for a week or ten days and rent the place. We had to buy our own food, but there were always vendors coming around with fresh fruit of all kinds, and freshly caught fish. The cook made the best fish and chips I have ever eaten. I stayed at several top class hotels in Kenya, but not once did I enjoy eating as much as at Diani House. My Last time there we left the cook a tip that was probably about the same amount as the salary he got while we were there. I commented on the fact when we decided tips. I was asked, "Was it worth it?". I could only agree fully.

Often I managed to invite a friend along on our trips. David Dixon came with us several times. He was a close friend, and one of the few guys my age who were around during school vacation. I think that one of the reasons I enjoyed the coast so much was because I had someone to do things with while there.

Tamasha was a house owned by a mission, and was on a reasonable beach just across the main harbour entrance from Mombasa. It was fairly small, but had two floors and a flat roof. We could sit on the roof and watch ships come in to Mombasa harbour. The Langmeads, an Australian family were with us, and David came along. My sister had finished high school, and was in Canada by then.

All the bedrooms on the second floor were taken up, so David and I decided to sleep on the roof. It was a good idea, but it had its drawbacks. We slept comfortably in our sleeping bags in the cool air, while everyone on the second floor sweated through the night. We slept comfortably, that is, until it started to rain, which it reliably did every night we were there. We would haul our sleeping bags inside for a few minutes while it poured, wait a few more minutes for it to dry, then go back out under a starry sky. One night we had three downpours. The next night we decided to try sleeping under the front porch on ground level. We got away from the rain, but were nearly eaten alive by bugs. We decided to try the roof again for our last night. We found a large plastic tarpaulin to keep off small showers. It didn't work. When it started to rain we pulled the plastic over us, but the rain kept coming. The plastic wasn't big enough, and the rain hit the ends of our air-mattresses and ran along the grooves, soaking our sleeping bags from below. We decided to move down to the hot, stuffy, but dry, living room for the remainder of the night.

That was in April 1982. I remember laying on the roof listening to BBC on my shortwave radio telling about the British setting up an exclusion zone around the Falkland Islands, threatening to sink any Argentine ships that were in it. In Mombasa harbour were two British Navy ships. One of them was the HMS Sheffield. We heard from some sailors that they were heading for the South Atlantic. It was a shock to hear three weeks later that it had been sunk. I now have some pictures of her at one of her last ports of call.

We always took our dog to the coast when we went. Prince was a yellow Labrador, and had the natural instinct of loving water. He was always afraid of waves, and didn't like coming out to us when we were swimming towards high tide. When he did come out to us he wanted to be held, so he didn't have to swim. Sometimes we would try to set him on top of a floating inner-tube. Sometimes he stayed, but more often he fell off. Prince would chase anything. If I threw a coconut out into the water he would go for it madly, hauling it back and getting he mouth full of spray. We always had him chasing sand-balls. If they were thrown in the air he would inevitably catch them. If they were thrown he would go after them madly, sometimes sticking his nose under the water to try to sniff them out. He never was too bright.

Travelling with Prince was a bit of a nightmare. Our first Labrador, Rafiki, would lay calmly under my mothers feet in the car. Not Prince. He was claustrophobic, and preferred to see what was going on-- in front, behind, and to either side.

The tradition at RVA, the school I went to, was for each class to raise money through high school, so that in grade twelve, the entire class could go to the coast and stay in a first class hotel for five days. This trip was called Senior Safari. Our class filled the school's bus. All the class knew each other, and most of my friends were in my class, so we had a great time.

We stayed at Two Fishes hotel, on the best stretch of Diani beach. We swam, walked, talked, tanned, and ate for five days. It was a trip that I had looked forward to since elementary school. I would have enjoyed it a bit more if Lisa, a college student from the States who was staying with us for the summer, had been there. There weren't any highlights from Senior Safari, it was really one big highlight, with no disappointments.

We always enjoyed beach walking in the full moon. We would walk the length of the beach, stopping in at all the hotels to see what was going on. When the moon was down we would lie on the beach and watch the stars. In later years more lights appeared along the beach, which I still think of as light pollution. It was hard to know where we were after walking a ways. Often we missed our place and had to reverse a ways.

Kenya was opened up at the beginning of this century by a railway line running from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Nairobi was started as an administrative centre half way along, and grew to the capital of Kenya. Usually we drove to the coast, but I had some chances to go by train. It was a thirteen hour overnight trip to travel the 500 km between Nairobi and Mombasa. We always ended up travelling second class, which had six people to a compartment, and seats that made up into beds for the night. We usually went to dinner in the dining car. It cost an extra 50/- ($4.50) or so, but was a full four course meal prepared right on the train. In these days of pre-packaged meals, it was a treat to eat a good meal off linen and silverware, on a train.

David and I once had a compartment of three places instead of six, and the third man didn't show. In the next compartment were three sisters who had just arrived in Kenya, and were going to RVA for the year. For the couple hours of daylight the next morning they were in our compartment trying to get away from a chain smoker in theirs. We were crossing the Athi plains, with large herds of game, so we had the chance to introduce the girls to some African animals. I seem to remember my trying to convince David that animals did not come in stacks or bunches, but in groups or herds. David and I had some strange arguments.

In the past few years, more hotels have sprung up along the best stretches of beach. Thousands of European tourists fly into Mombasa and are bussed along the highway to Diani Beach. It is cheaper for them to spend a week on the Kenya coast than a week on the Riviera. Now walking along the more crowded beach you will sometimes be greeted by an African selling some type of curios with a "Wie gehts!"

I sometimes think how nice it would be if the coast was the quiet beach it was when we first saw it. I guess that wherever there has been a paradise on some secluded corner of the earth, everyone wants to have a part of it.