10th April
Most of the Expats in Lagos had already left for their Easter holidays when we left on the overnight flight to Nairobi with Kenya Airways. Inger-Lise never manages to sleep on these flights but the rest of us got some shuteye. Daniel even managed to sleep for about an hour afer leaving the flight! We then changed terminal and took an hour-long domestic flight on to Malindi on the Kenyan Coast. The bus was there to pick us up and bumped us along the road for 20mins to the hotel.

We stayed at Hemingways Resort on a beach at a village called Watamu. The reef there is part of a national park. I had actually stayed at the same beach (about 1 hour's walk away) 18 years ago for Christmas 1988 (my first holiday as a new teacher in Ethiopia). It was nice to see that the place hadn't changed much. Back then I stayed for a week with some other teachers at a house owned by a lady called Barbara Simpson (Plot 28). Co-incidentally Hemingways Resort had been opened only the month before.

There were quite a number of people staying at the hotel for the first few days we were there - i.e. before the schools restarted. In the evenings there was entertainment and buffet dinners were served out on the terrace by the beach. The dinners moved indoors after the first few days because there were less people and because the rainy season was starting.

We didn't mind, though! It was just nice to be out of Lagos and we needed the break! We met two familes from Zimbabwe: Rob and Ernestine & Giles and Clare. We had a great time together and the kids had a ball.

We hired a very nice young Kenyan nanny for Mathilde for the whole time we were there. Her name was Irene and worked as one of the housemaids at the hotel. Mathilde got on very well with her.

While we were at the hotel, we snorkelled off the reef, I did a PADI open water diving course, we went on a sunset cruise on a Dhow, Mathilde rode a camel (which she didn't stop talking about), we visited a snake farm and Inger-Lise went shopping in Watamu (on a "tuc tuc" 3-wheel motorcycle) and in Malindi (by Coach). More about all this later....

Jeremy