BACK TO THE beach

it’s not every day that I wake up in a banda right on the edge of the Indian Ocean, here in the northernmost peninsula of Manda Island in the Lamu archipelago. This is a place you go to get lost. Arriving from Nairobi the previous evening, it was like someone painted the vista overnight.

I imagined that Manda Bay is how the Garden of Eden would look if it were cast next to the sea. The water, now out in a tide, was a beautiful shade of blue, as if competing with the sky. Birds with long beaks circled above, squawking and flapping. The morning sun sparkled across the waves, shimmering like a bed of diamonds.

I laced up my shoes, slapped some sunscreen