Wednesday, November 28, 2012

The Kenyan Coast

With Rhonda away for Thanksgiving at a conference in DC, I took the kids on a mini-vacation to the Kenyan Coast - Sand Island Beach.  We took an early morning flight from Nairobi to Mombasa.  During the flight we even got a glimpse of snow covered Mt. Kilimanjaro.  Upon landing in Mombasa the humidity was very noticeable - hadn't felt that in many months.  Since Nairobi is at such a high altitude there is none.  We jumped in a cab and stopped in a supermarket so we could stock up for the next three days.  I had debated going to all-inclusive resort (with kid's clubs, pool, restaurants, etc.) or a self-catering cottage kind of place, in the end I decided on the latter since it was a lot cheaper and the place I identified seemed amazing.  So that was the reason for the stop at the market.

The next stop in our adventure was a short ferry ride across the river outside Mombasa to the south coast area.





By lunch time we had made it to our slice of paradise.... ahh it was gorgeous!






I did hire a cook for the three days we were there - it was very much worth it, as all the cooking, cutting, cleaning was all taken care of.  That certainly contributed to the pleasant weekend.  We even bought fish from the local fishermen and he cooked and cleaned them - one night we had the local shrimp too - delicious!



 Our first afternoon we took a short boat ride to see starfish - the kids loved it.  The next day we walked to the African Pool and swam into a cave.  The fish were amazing, besides their beautiful colors there was also a school of tiny fish that always kept the shape of a larger fish - very neat.  The rest of the day was spent lounging around and walking out to the sand bar.  The next day we went back to the star fish to take some pictures and I went snorkeling in ocean past the reef.  Sadly in the afternoon it was time to leave and catch our flight...  All reports from the kids said it was a super weekend - two big thumbs up!



2 comments:

  1. Mama's extremely jealous from chilly DC - and in awe of my husband for being up for the journey as a solo parent. 4 more days til I'm home.. er.. back... with my family cause you're my home!

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  2. Some people have asked if the starfish are alive -- YES, very much so... on the bottom of them are hundreds of little 'feet' that you can see wiggling around and you can also see them move across the sand... that picture up above with Matthew and Ruby sitting right behind them - within one or two minutes the starfish had all moved away from the neat square we arranged them in...

    second question that has come up - is about the sand... further away from the shoreline is was quite fine and powdery, right next to the water line the sand was really more like millions upon trillions of tiny ground up shells, in NJ the sand is really just tiny pebbles but here it is more like ground up shells, but they are so small and weather beaten that it is smooth and lovely to walk on.

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