Watamu – The White Sand
Although I live on an island and am surrounded by the sea, I had never seen the ocean. I mean that I’d never been in the sea or on the beach washed by what could truly be called an ocean. I have lived and still live in the Irish Sea and have holidayed in the Mediterranean but never went to an ocean shore.
Fred had planned to take us to Watamu for other reasons. He wanted us to look for birds – and elephant shrew – in the Sokoke Forest and had found us somewhere cheap that happened to be right on the beach.
Now I’m sure everyone has an idealistic view of the Indian Ocean – White coral sands, wide blue lagoons and barrier reefs and of course swaying palm trees. I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, but it’s all true! Mwamba Research Centre is right on the beach and there are palm trees along the shore. The water is warm – hot might be a better description at near to 30° - and it is an azure blue when the tide is out, protected by a barrier reef a few hundred metres out from shore.
As someone on safari, it offers little more than a convenient place to stay. The food is monotonous – rice every meal – but tasty enough and plentiful. There’s no alcohol – except that which we bring for ourselves – not a first for this trip. Sokoke Forest, Mida Creek and Watamu Marine Park are all right here and that’s more than enough for a few days.
As a tourist it offers everything that the Indian Ocean can provide – sun, sea and sand. The sun is hot – but not unbearably so. The sea is warm – almost unbearably so but delightful just the same. The sand is fine and white – lots of crabs but they run from your slightest approach and don’t pinch. Add all this together and you have an idyllic holiday destination. If it wasn’t for the perceived security questions that still surround Kenya it would be filled with happy holidaymakers. As it is, as I write this, it’s deserted. When Chris and I went for a swim at four in the afternoon we were the only two people in the water as far as we could see in either direction. We even took the chance to see how the other half spend time here, going for a beer at the Turtle Beach Resort a couple of kilometres up the road. The facilities were tremendous, but the place was all but deserted. When we enquired – not serious but curious – we were told we could book for about $70 per person for all inclusive – little more than we were paying in our down-market hostel.
The actual plan, of course, was to go to the forest and look for birds. Some plans had been made and we were set to take a trip to Mida Creek first to look for the waders and shore birds of the mangroves and sand banks. The organisation of this trip turned out to be less than perfect, as we missed our appointed guide through a miss-understanding and had to find an alternative one at short notice when we got to the creek.
The creek is a large expanse of sandy mudflats, surrounded by mangrove forests that are flooded as the tide comes in. We had arranged to arrive as the tide was on the return and then stay for a couple of hours to watch as the wading birds were pushed up the beaches towards us. Mida Creek has a good bird hide, reached by 200m of wire-suspended boardwalks that are a little tricky to walk along if you are not used to them.
Once at the hide we had a pleasant onshore breeze and good shade. I actually found it difficult to look out onto the pure white mudflats at first, but soon got used to it and began to be able to see the small shore birds as they moved over the sands, keeping ahead of the approaching tide. And, thankfully, the birds were there. Plovers, sandpipers, egrets, terns and even flamingos made an appearance as we waited patiently for the incoming waters.
Our ideal viewing conditions were soon destroyed by the arrival of some Kenyan visitors. I still don’t know why they chose this place for a Sunday afternoon outing – when listing places to take your girlfriend / wife, I don’t think that a swamp comes high on the list of possibilities. They seemed to be intent on making as much noise as possible, moving about as much as possible and taking as many staged photos of each other as possible. Frankly, Mida Creek isn’t a photogenic place. It’s somewhere you come to see the birds, but not to photograph the place itself. It’s just white mud and blue sky with some trees on the far shore – and much less than even this if you’re using a mobile phone as your camera. I could be even more uncharitable about them, but there’s little point in worrying about it as they soon got bored of the place and the birds didn’t actually seem to be too bothered.
For me, the biggest problem with the visit was having to go in the heat of the afternoon. Temperatures were well into the mid-thirties and the sun was scorching. I was glad when we had the hide to offer a bit of respite, but once back out in the sun and sheltered from the wind by the mangroves, it was unbearably hot and humid.
By the end of the day, we had all our misunderstandings about the guide and his schedule sorted out and had firm plans to go into the forest early the following morning. Jonathan is an expert on the area, not just the birds, but all the wildlife and the plants as well. He had made careful plans for us to be in the right places to see the birds we wanted to see – Sokoke Pipit, Sokoke Scops Owl and Clarke’s Weaver – as well as maybe seeing the Elephant Shrews that inhabit the floor of the forest.
As things turned out, the Elephant Shrews were the easiest to see – as we drove into the forest before dawn they were seen running away from us down a path. They moved too quickly for a photograph, but you did at least get a sense of them being big and bouncy. Jonathan, our guide to the forest, knew where all the birds should be and had arranged for someone to locate the owls for later in the morning. We spent the morning walking in the forest and looking for the pipits and weavers.
We didn’t have much success. We saw the pipit, but only flying around high above us, not on or near the ground where we might get some pictures. There was no sign of the Clarke’s Weavers, but we did see some other birds of interest and even had a couple more glimpses of the elephant shrews.
We had much better luck with the owls. David, the second guide had been out all night, finding their roosts for another group of watchers. Once they had seen them, he stayed in the area and then phoned us to tell us where to find him to be guided to them. We picked him up then drove a couple of kilometres through the countryside before turning off-road down a narrow track into the forest. Once on foot we were taken to the locations where two pairs of owls were roosting. Two pairs because the owl occurs in two colour morphs and David had located both of them for us, the brown and the grey.
They may be one of the rarest birds in the world – only about 1000 pairs in just this one location – but they must also be one of the cutest. They are tiny, fluffy, big-eyed and roost as a pair, close together on the same branch. We got pretty good views really, considering they like to roost in the deepest thickets. It took a bit of effort to get either up or down to clear the view of branches but we all ended up with useable photos.
By the time we got back for a late lunch, I’d had enough of bird-watching. Fred, Chris and Emmy went out with Jonathan again the next morning but I decided to have a rest. They did finally get to see the pipit, as well as a few other birds, but nothing that really bothered me to have missed. It was our last day before slowly heading back to Nairobi and home. Plenty of time for another swim and a relaxed dinner before another early start.
Voi Wildlife Lodge
Rather than trying to drive more than 450km from Watamu back to Nairobi in one day, we had a stop planned in Voi – about half way. Fred had chosen a little luxury, by booking us into a proper safari lodge for the night. We had originally planned to spend the day going back through Tsavo, but the road we had used to come down to Watamu was the only way to do this and it was in a terrible state. We all decided that we would forego the trip back through the park and drive around. These roads were better – still not great, but better – and we made it to Voi just in time for a late lunch.
The lodge was massive – more than 150 rooms built to cater for the pure tourist safari trade. Sadly, because of the security concerns, it was almost empty. When we went over for dinner there were only about 40 people including us – we were almost outnumbered by the staff. Of course this means you get great service and indeed we did. We also had good food for the whole stay and the showers were absolutely brilliant.
The lodge isn’t in the park, although most visitors obviously pay their $75 and go inside, but it is right next to the park and has its own waterholes that are visible from the bar and viewing platforms. Naturally, you have no guarantee that something will come to the waterhole, but it lets you do a bit of wildlife watching with a beer in hand. We were only there for one night, but because we arrived fairly early in the afternoon, we had a few hours to just sit and relax.
We soon spotted some buffalo in a more distant wallow – actually because they were surrounded by egrets – but nothing else was around in the heat of the day. As the temperatures started to cool down, the wildlife started to heat up. We spotted a couple of elephants in the bush on the far edge of the clearing, nervous at first, but soon a whole family group were out in the open and slowly moving towards us. They took their time, but soon more than a dozen animals were drinking at the waterhole, just 20 metres from where we were sitting.
Over the next hour, as darkness slowly began to fall, we had several more individuals come for water, including one bull who enjoyed a riotous thirty minute bath in the main waterhole with much splashing and photo opportunities galore. As he left in the direction of the raised viewing platform Fred and I followed him and got some really close-up shots as he passed below us just a couple of metres away. Even after dark we could see three large bulls around the water in the glare of the lodge floodlights.
Heading Home
The next morning we had a leisurely breakfast and loaded the vehicle for our final journey. We headed back up the Mombasa Highway for the 250km trip to Nairobi with plenty of time to spare to allow for the traffic. As it turned out, the trucks were not as numerous as they had been on the way down, maybe we were ahead of the rush. We made reasonable time, but the general standard of driving was as bad as ever. Everyone seems so impatient on the highway. We were overtaken, undertaken, undertaken on the dirt, you name it, people used it to get round you. Thankfully the Chinese are building a new railway from Mombasa to Nairobi and this will eventually ease the volume of goods traffic on a road that is not adequate to the task.
We had a couple of hours to freshen up in Nairobi before heading across town to our dinner appointment with Alex and Mishack – they run a safari company and had been responsible for booking parts of this trip and our last visit to Kenya. We had dinner at Carnivore – once the place for all types of wild game meat until it was made illegal in Kenya – but now just a meat-lover’s carvery with the odd exotic meat as a bonus. Dinner was good, but I don’t like crocodile. It was worth trying, but it’s a bit like fishy chicken – the taste and texture don’t match which I found really off-putting. Everything else was excellent though. Emmy was in his element – he doesn’t eat red meat but they had turkey and chicken to compensate. I don’t think he’d ever seen as big a bird as a roast turkey and he loved it.
We didn’t really have enough time to enjoy ourselves fully and even leaving at just after nine we were more than an hour getting to the airport because of chaotic security checks. Once in the airport emigration and check-in were much more efficient and we were soon on our way home.
The Final Analysis
It’s always difficult to say you’ve enjoyed such a long trip after the long journey back, I like to wait a few days and sort things out in my mind before I say what I really think. Once again it was a long and sometimes gruelling trip. How the others cope so well when they are that much older than me is amazing. I was exhausted at times and sometimes wished that Kenya was a smaller country. The distances are not huge, we never did more than 250km in a single day, but even that is a problem when the roads are bad, the driving is terrible and the temperature is over 35°.
So, yeah, travelling around is hard, but you don’t get to see 470 species of birds without visiting all the ecosystems. The birds are the highlight in some ways – they keep you going when nothing else is being seen and they are always a delight – especially the rare species that we have seen on this trip.
For me, of course, they are not everything and to some degree the lack of big game was a bit of a let-down. Fred and I caught a glimpse of a Golden Cat at Ithumba – but it was nothing more than a walk across the road with no hope of a photo. It adds another cat to my list, but I wish we had more of a view of such an elusive and rarely seen animal. They are not really known in eastern Africa, but it is slowly becoming apparent that they are there and just difficult to see. Apart from a few jackals we didn’t see any other predators and only a few of the common antelopes, together with some zebra and a few giraffes.
The big highlight of course was to see the huge herds of elephants at Ithumba. It is probably safe to say that seeing that many in one place will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I found it truly moving. I’d have taken the whole trip just for that one short hour on the dam in the blazing sun and would go through the whole trip again if it could be repeated. Sadly I know that it probably will never be repeated. Elephants don’t get together in those numbers very often and you have to be in the right place at the right time.
So, did I enjoy the trip? Of course I did, I had a great time with good friends in a varied and interesting country with great wildlife and scenery. Would I do it again? Who knows? I’ve been to Kenya three times now and maybe need to see some more of the African continent before returning to Kenya one day. Of course, I also need to start saving again before I can take such a long and expensive trip again.