Whoever Fears the Sea, Justin Fox [i love reading .TXT] 📗

After a quiet night in the Mkokoni channel, Jamal motored to the north end of the bay and anchored off Kiwayu Safari Lodge. Paul had asked to be put ashore for twenty-four hours to reconnoitre the resort where the film crew would be staying. While he was on land, Jamal would do a short fishing trip.

Paul stepped ashore and Trisha, the manager, walked down the beach to meet him. ‘Welcome to paradise!’ she said, handing him a cocktail adorned with a paper umbrella and fruit kebab. Trisha was an attractive, resourceful, thirtysomething Kenyan; barefoot, blonde and blue-eyed, wearing a red bikini top with a green kikoi. Paradise indeed, thought Paul, trying not to let his gaze drift to her curves.

The lodge was Robinson Crusoe chic and comprised a line of reed-and-thatch bandas overlooking the beach. Even better than the brochure, he reckoned. Conches, calabashes and cowries adorned pathways that led to the main building, reached along an avenue of immaculate palm trees that leant inwards, as though bowing to the guests. He knocked the trunk of one to make sure they weren’t fibreglass. The lodge was an open-plan, makuti-roofed enclosure. Mahogany logs had been fashioned into chunky tables and a bar counter. Skulls, horns and turtle shells formed a motif intended to evoke conservation.

‘Much poaching around here?’ asked Paul.

‘Sure,’ said Trisha. ‘This place actually started out as a hunting camp back in the seventies. In those days, elephants still walked the beach and foraged on the islands, but by the mid-eighties they’d all been slaughtered. Fish stocks got hammered too.’

‘Really? I thought the fishing was good,’ he said, thinking of all the dhows he’d seen.

‘Much of it got wiped out a few years ago by a Japanese fleet with thirty-kilometre lines,’ said Trisha. ‘They bought the fishing rights from the Kenyan government — the right to rape and pillage, more like. They took out everything. We used to be able to catch three marlins in a morning; now you can’t get one. But the fishing in Somali waters is still great.’

Trisha showed him to his room. The grass-walled banda had an enormous bed set beneath a mosquito net, a two-person hammock and colourful throw cushions scattered everywhere. The shell of a giant clam stood in the doorway to wash beach sand from one’s feet. This was a dream Africa, a fantasy Swahili-land which Paul found both seductive and unreal.

After unpacking, he joined Trisha for a beer in the lounge. She was witty and charming, interspersing her enquiries about food preferences and entertainment needs with titbits about the WWF turtle project and etiquette when visiting the local village. She dropped in all the prerequisite eco and conservation soundbites: the lodge cleaned the beaches, employed local people, protected the wildlife and fought the charcoal burners destroying the forest. Paul pretended to take notes.

Being so near the border, he asked about the situation in Somalia.

‘It’s a bit wild and woolly up there right now,’ she said, scrunching up her petite nose. ‘I wouldn’t advise going.’

‘We’re not sailing very far north, and for the most part we’ll be staying a long way offshore.’

Paul discovered that Trisha was also mad about dhows and was considering organising charters along the coast for the lodge’s guests. He filled her in on the details of his documentary project and his own dream of one day sailing down as far as Mozambique, maybe even South Africa, on a dhow. Trisha said she’d be game to join such a venture and hauled out a 1966 Admiralty Chart of the coast.

They traced a possible route and anchorages, discussing where to sail far offshore and where to slip inside the reefs. Their animated talk and mutual encouragement made it seem almost possible. If they found a sponsor and made a movie about it, maybe they could even pick up a dhow in Oman — in Sur or Muscat — and sail to Africa on the Kaskazi. They’d need a rubber duck to scoot across shallow coral and land on desert islands. They’d dress in turbans and galabias. Their very own Arabian Nights.

Paul liked Trisha a lot. She was down-to-earth and no nonsense. There was none of the unpredictability and drama of Hannah. In place of his initial sexual attraction, he now thought she might become a friend, a lasting friend, maybe even a future shipmate.

Returning to the business at hand, Paul made arrangements for the film crew and did a walkabout with Trisha. The lodge had everything they would need. She offered to show him their exclusive, $1000-a-day honeymoon suite, called The Baobabs of Kitangani, situated across the bay on the northernmost tip of Kiwayu.

The motorboat sank its bows into the sand and they stepped ashore beside a gazebo with hammocks, grass mats and throw cushions. On a hill above the deserted beach stood a couple of bandas reached by a sandy path through the trees. The lower one was nestled among baobabs and housed the largest bed Paul had ever seen. It would have been just the place to bring Hannah. They could have emailed each other from opposite sides of the bed.

‘The staff are a few hundred metres away,’ said Trisha. ‘You can call them on a walkie-talkie for meals, a water taxi or whatever you need. Otherwise, you’re completely private. Some guests go naked from the moment they set foot here. This is really the place to come with a lover or a sugar daddy. Honeymoons usually mark the end of high passion, don’t they?’ She winked. Paul just smiled.

Mkokoni lay around the corner, so prying eyes couldn’t see the naked lovers as they frolicked about in paradise. But what did the conservative Swahili villagers make of all this? Back at the lodge, Paul spent the rest of the afternoon sailing a Laser around the bay. The dinghy was a fun craft for the light airs, and he