Beat The Heat On Kenya's Coolest Island

A hit with wastrels, writers and royals, Kenya’s Lamu is one of the most storied corners on Earth. It has been lying low for a while— now we revisit its classics.

- Peter Browne

I met a blind man in Matondoni who had worked on the most majestic dhow on the Swahili coast of East Africa 50 years ago. Long before the Tusitiri (enasoit.com; US$4,140 or 2,86,420 for the boat) was refitted as an elegant place to stay, she was a workhorse plying the trade routes between Arabia and Mombasa, carrying spices, coffee, skins, ivory and mangrove poles.

Sitting beneath a tamarind tree in his home village on the Kenyan island of Lamu, quietly weaving rope for donkey harnesses, Bwana Mzee could still recall his three-month-long journeys on the stately dhow, sailing north to Oman and Yemen on the Kaskazi and in the opposite direction on the Kusi trade winds.

In the late 1980s, a Norwegian family, the Astrups, found the Tusitiri’s abandoned skeleton on a beach and decided to rebuild the vessel, calling on Bwana Mzee to help put her back together again. After that, he sailed on the dhow for 22 more years, voyaging as far south as the Quirimbas archipelago in Mozambique, where he lost his heart and fathered a daughter, Asha.

The word safari is Swahili for ‘journey’, and it is still used in its purest form along this coast. Today the boat can be chartered from the Astrups to sail up to Kiwayu, an isolated, mesmerisingly beautiful islet on the Somali border, but it is more commonly found plying the waters of the Lamu archipelago, which is a timeless world of reflected sea and sky.