The white sands and coral reefs of Mombasa’s North coast beaches had never been more lonely and fun as I witnessed during a visit in January, 2021 at the peak of Covid-19 pandemic. It was like a scene from a movie where the main star had hired an entire beach to him and his fiancé to propose to her!
The entire Bamburi beach stretching from White Sands Beach Hotel to Nyali Beach Hotel, only had a handful of tourists, with a few beach boys and hawkers hanging around looking for business. Mother Nature did not seem to notice or care as the scorching sun rose at dawn in the cloudy sky and the low tide season begun with crabs and other marine animals being washed ashore by the waves of salty water.
The Covid-19 pandemic was at its peak and no one, both local and foreign tourists, was daring to go to the beach in line with the strict Ministry of Health guidelines and government restrictions.
Mother Nature’s wrath
According to the United Nations World Trade Organisation (WTO) estimates, the pandemic had imposed an unprecedented blow to the travel and tourism sector by reducing international tourist arrivals in the first quarter of 2020 to a mere fraction of what they were in the first quarter of 2019.
Available government data pointed to a double-digit reduction of 22 per cent in the first quarter of 2020, with arrivals in March down by 57 per cent. And to ensure the social-distancing directives were followed to the letter, the famous Jomo Kenyatta Beach had been closed to the public.
I managed to ‘sneak’ in through a tourist hotel where I was asked to pay half board, KSh. 5,000 in order to benefit from their lunch, afternoon tea and swimming pool and well-manicured grounds. I gave it a wide berth, as I was on low budget holiday, and walked through the empty hotel, restaurant and swimming pool, onto the empty beach where I had whole space to myself.
This was a big contrast to 2018 when I patronized one of the hotels during a couples’ retreat for an entire weekend; the facility was fully booked plus the neighboring ones as well. The beaches were a sea of humanity, men, women and children, both local and foreign. The swimming pools and the beaches had been a beehive of activities as beach boys, traders and water sports teams made a killing, literally.
Deserted beach and tourist villas and hotels
I then enjoyed a 30 minute walk on the beach carrying my rack sack, towel, and snacks and reading materials, before identifying a coral reef with nice mature palm trees around it to be my home for the rest of the day. Meanwhile, the many beautiful villas and multi-billion shillings tourist hotels along the beach were like haunted facilities with hardly a soul seen walking in or out.
The cave-like coral reef became my base for the next four hours of solitude, imbibing the fresh air from the ocean, and took breaks to take a dip in the salty warm waters every so often.
My towel had a double use, acted as ‘mattress’ and also to wipe the water from my body. I had a scary moment when my nap was interrupted by a Somali man who was crisscrossing the beach from the West going East with his two mature camels. It was like a scene from Jurassic Park, the movie!
I quickly got up shaking my head to confirm that what I was seeing was real and not a nightmare or a thriller! And just as I was adjusting, my peace was further interrupted by one of the camels which decided to flee from its owner who was washing the partner and it strolle
d straight to where I lay down in the canopy of the coral reef and sat next to me staring straight into my eyes with its huge nose and mouth wide opened as if asking me to: “do something!”
Scary moment
I took advantage of our company after adjusting to the intruder to take some very unique photos for 30 minutes before it got back and joined its owner to patrol down the lonely beach towards Jomo Kenyatta Public Beach.
By then I had enough of my quality time reading Promised Land, by former United States President Barack Obama, the previous weekend’s newspapers, and some religious literature, so I took off and called it a day.
While exiting from one of the tourist hotels, I spoke with one of the managers who confessed that business had never been so bad in the tourism sector in his over 30 years’ experience in the industry.
According to the manager, the pandemic had dealt them a double blow: No foreign tourists were visiting nor were locals patronizing the facilities forcing the management to reduce salaries, allowances, number of staff and to also embark on serious cost-cutting measures among others.
Lamented the manager: “We have had some bad seasons in the past, but this Corona-19 has devastated our businesses completely including our lives and entire economy. We don’t know whether we will ever recover soon.”
Worst tourism season ever
Indeed, the sentiments were shared by a cross section of stakeholders in the entire tourism industry who included a woman taxi driver, businesspeople at the famous Fort Jesus Museum, Mombasa Old Town, Likoni Ferry, Mama Ngina Water Front, Haller Park, Moorings Floating Restaurant in Mtwapa, on the Mombasa-Kilifi County bridge and the Miritini Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) station enroute back to my base in Nairobi.
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