The coast Mida Creek,Watamu and Malindi

Lovely drive up the coast road from Kilifi to Malindi stopping off to check out Ocean Sports in Watamu for lunch. Malindi was a bit of a pit and having tried our luck again with the Kenya Wildlife Service who really don’t like independent travelers and wanted US$ 50 for us to park ….we ended up in the Red Cross car park for the night.
We noticed signs for an Eco camp on our way up the coast so we decided to retrace our steps to Mida Creek Eco Lodge which was wonderful. The only resident was an Herpetologist who had been there for a couple of months and had Malaria…well if you will go off into the bush looking for frogs in the rainy season what do you expect?

We were soon joined by a group of 7 Africa Asia Venture students who were enjoying a real “gap yeah” lovely crowd who we had seen at Ocean Sports earlier in the day.
From Mida Creek we went to visit the ancient Swahili ruins at Gede


and did a wonderful bush walk through the Cashew forest ( I didn’t know the cashew grew as a single nut on the end of a small soft fruit).
Hassan our local guide was incredibly knowledgeable, we saw a stunning variety of birds and butterflies as well as Baobab trees in full flower. ( I didn’t know Tartar came from the seed pods of the Baobab either!)

We returned to Ocean Sports for the weekend and Gail (pronounced Jail by the local staff) let us stay in the car park for one night before moving into our banda on Friday.

Lucy had stayed at Ocean Sports 30 years ago with her parents and had fond memory’s of a lovely holiday. Its still terrific and has a strong local following. The bar was buzzing most nights the local Hockey club played on Friday and they have curry lunch and live music on Sunday!

Ocean Sports