It’s the stuff of Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone, and H Rider Haggard. And for a 34-year-old Ernest Miller Hemingway, it turned out to be the ultimate Boy’s Own adventure. In December 1933, driven by a passion for adventuring and deep-sea fishing, the renowned American writer, accompanied by his second wife Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, embarked on an expedition to Africa. His trip would take in a safari and a remarkable journey to the realm he’d immortalise in his short story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
But it was the coastal paradise of Watamu and its untouched splendour that truly stole the celebrated globetrotter’s heart, and where nearly 100 years later I, too, succumbed to its magic. Here, I’d encounter coral reefs, crystal-clear seas, wild dolphins and a ruined 12th century Swahili town inhabited by monkeys, like something from The Jungle Book – oh, and, rather unexpectedly, two Italian gelaterias, but more on that later…
As another famous writer once wrote: ‘To begin at the beginning’. After an overnight stay in Nairobi, we boarded our Jambojet (propeller) plane for the short 50-minute hop to Malindi on the south coast and watched the city give way to the greens and gold of the savannahs before rising above the clouds, where we stared, slack-jawed, at the impossibly beautiful snow-capped summit of Kilimanjaro looming at us out of the haze. To look down upon its brooding crater, dormant – but not extinct – as we passed over, was a moment I’ll never forget.
The short drive from Malindi to Watamu – a place a fellow traveller from South Africa assured me was ‘the most beautiful place on earth’ – took in passing tuk-tuks, uniformed children coming home from school, the odd tourist and roadside shops selling everything from bread to bikinis, beauty services to bed frames.
Watamu itself did not disappoint. The village is small and very pretty, the vibe friendly and a little lazy in the heat. Its colour palette is vivid, and its waterside environs are no different. The first thing I noticed was the almost endless spectrum of blue in the sea alone. No wonder it’s a favourite with fashion editors – Kenyan-born Halima Aden made history when she posed on Watamu Beach in Sports Illustrated’s 2019 swimsuit issue, as the first model to don a hijab and burkini in its pages. I could have sat and gazed at those blues for hours.
Named after the writer who fell hard for this special spot’s charms, the five-star boutique Hemingways Watamu is the brainchild of a Brit, Richard “Dicky” Evans, who first came to East Africa in the late 1960s to work as a consulting engineer. His love for Watamu led him to establish Hemingways here in the 1980s, and he now also has properties in Nairobi and the Maasai Mara. Like Hemingway, Dicky was a big fan of deep-sea fishing: the hotel bar is decorated with huge mounted blue marlins, trophies of fishing trips past. And, despite challenges faced by the tourism industry, deep-sea fishing remains a prominent pursuit along Kenya’s coastline.
Perched on a stool at this old-school bar – a place to swap stories and down cocktails – you can well imagine yourself sitting beside the ghost of old Ernest himself, as he regales you with the tale of how he eventually encountered the majestic marlin he’d long sought, after two exhilarating days of deep-sea fishing amid the azure waters and vibrant coral reefs. Another cocktail, Ernest? Don’t mind if I do. As Hemingway once mused, ‘Drinking is a way of ending the day’. Plump for “Papa’s favourite tipple”, a daiquiri, or watch the sun go down over a chilli mango mojito (brace yourself – it has a bit of a kick).
Our afternoon unfolded with a voyage aboard a dhow boat, gracefully gliding through the tranquil waters, passing fishermen returning home. As the dhow’s long wooden hull caressed the waters, we drifted along the creek before diving from the boat’s pinnacle into the warm depths below. In these fleeting moments of utter serenity, time itself seemed to come to a standstill. As if on cue, we surrendered to the extraordinary spectacle of the sun gently descending behind the verdant hills, in a breathtaking display of vibrant orange hues.
That night, being Saturday night after all, armed with a little local knowledge, we headed 10 minutes north up the coast road to the place to be – Papa Remo. A narrow track takes you to a gateway manned by towering locals in tribal dress, but step through iron gates to enter an Ibiza-style beach club, with a huge sand dance floor. Here, tables and chairs are set out on the sand under straw parasols, facing the sea, where waiters bring pizza and pasta. Then, at midnight, it transforms from a restaurant to a banging fairy-lit club, the dance floor thronging with locals and holiday makers alike, turning the little beach haven into one massive rave.
Papa Remo’s owner is Italian, and the ‘Papa Remo’ it is named for is his dad – 95 and still going strong. The area has a large Italian population leftover from the 1960s and ’70s when Italy joined forces with Kenya to build the Broglio Space Center, just down the road from Malindi. And the Italian influence is everywhere – from the pasta restaurants to the gelateria, the signs in Italian and the names of the boats: our snorkelling boat was called Amico Mio. Today, Hemingways Watamu, too, is run by a genial Italian named Paolo.
After a modestly hedonistic Saturday night, we were relatively fresh for a Sunday morning treat: a boat trip to see if we could catch sight of the wild dolphins dipping in the clear waters. It took a couple of hours of idling and squinting but our patience was rewarded and for half an hour the dolphins then swam alongside us, ducking down and playing hide and seek. We lingered to explore the nearby reefs in the Watamu Marine National Park and Reserve, snorkelling to see the marine life close-up. Established in 1968, it has been recognised as a Unesco World Biosphere Reserve since 1979, and its coral gardens, situated 300 metres from the shore, host a rich diversity of marine life, including more than 600 fish species.
Protecting the ocean is fundamental to Watamu, and understanding a community’s values and commitment to the world around them is becoming increasingly important to any trip. We visited the innovative recycling centre, EcoWorld, which does so much to keep the impact of tourism to an absolute minimum, focusing on details such as the removal of plastic bags, which local turtles can mistake for jellyfish in the water, a key part of their diet. Local businesses, including Hemingways, are extremely conscious of the environment and in particular sustaining the waters around Watamu for the benefit of the marine wildlife. And conservation efforts thrive here, in the shape of organisations such as the Local Ocean Trust dedicated to safeguarding endangered sea turtles and their habitats.
It was humbling to see the respect for local wildlife and the care for everything that makes Watamu such a special place. The recycling centre not only reuses plastic and glass, turning some of the materials into tourist souvenirs and flip-flops, but also demonstrates glass blowing, composting, permaculture and biofuel briquette-making as an alternative to charcoal and biogas production from manure and tree nurseries, to show other communities how they too can insure the future of their local environment.
Our final day, before we reluctantly moved on, introduced us to the ruins of Gede – built by the Swahili people in the 12th century, and now mysteriously abandoned 600 years ago and left to rewild. Designated as a Unesco World Heritage Site, this was once a bustling cosmopolitan trade centre, connecting East Africa to India, Persia and China. Today, venturing into the nearby Gede ruins, surrounded by ancient carved stones and the foundations of long-crumbled ancient buildings, it feels akin to being dropped into an Indiana Jones movie. Spread across 45 acres, the ruins boast a diverse array of structures from mosques to palaces, crafted from coral stone and mangrove timber. Throughout, we were shadowed by the elusive Sykes’ monkeys, their curious eyes peering from lofty perches and concealed hideaways, or darting between the ancient relics, trailing our every move.
The night before we left this enchanted place, Hemingway’s words from his 1935 non-fiction account of his expedition, Green Hills of Africa, echoed in my head: ‘All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.’
hemingways-collection.com/watamu
Lysanne Currie is editor in chief of Meet the Leader. She also writes for Robb Report, Diplomat, Guardian, Influence, Tempus and Investor
