14 August -- Malindi (by Roger)

After the sterile, family-fun-for-all, corporate atmosphere of the Voyager hotel in Mombassa, we’re really loving things here at the Driftwood Beach Club. This place is more relaxed and has more personality than that other, and people actually use the beach. We’ve found out that a lot of Kenyans join this “hotel” with a membership that lets them come here on weekends, and we see a lot of locally-registered cars in the parking area. The atmosphere is casual, there are fewer kids, and everything feels much less like it’s part of a package tour deal that things did at the other hotel.

We were trying to throw off the feeling of repose that has overcome us here, and as part of that, we arranged to get a car to the Arabuko Sokoke Forest Reserve at 6 am. The idea was to get there early when birds were real active. The Arabuko Preserve is famous on the coast as the best place to do birding – it has many completely unique species – so we wanted to be sure to get there.

Six in the morning was awful early for this part of the trip, but we managed to get up and get out by then. The Driftwood even got us a pitcher of coffee and some toast to send us off! Ali, our driver from yesterday, was right there and ready to go, so off we went right on time. There was some uncertainty at the ranger office as to who had reserved whom as a guide, and I’m sure we ended up with the best part of the deal. Our guide, Alex Mwalimu, was such a bird expert that he recognized everything by call, calls I couldn’t even hear. Even more, he’s mentioned in our bird field guide with an acknowledgement. Alex was way out of our field in birding.

So this is what real birding is like. Alex assumed we weren’t particularly interested the general coastal birds because, despite our saying we weren’t really “listers” who want to come out and see as many birds as they can write down, we did resort to keeping a list of what we’d seen. In very short order, Alex was ripping off the rare birds of Arabuko while I was interested in trying to see the big, colorful, common-as-a-blue-jay birds like the Narina Trogon. That said, we did see the very rare (and beautiful) Amani Sunbird, and we also saw the Clarke’s Weaver, a nondescript bird found only in Arabuko. Although I didn’t see it, David also got a look at the Sokoko Pipit, another bird only found in Arabuko; David told me it was pretty much a bland little grey thing, and I’m inclined to believe him as consolation. It was educational to see how a real birder goes after his birds: Alex would hear something and launch straightaway into the woods after it. Nothing discrete or indirect about his manner at all. And if the bird flew away, he’d head across the forest after it, too, regardless of vines, thorns or snakes. And I should mention that the Arabuko Sokoke forest is much, much more impenetrable than Bwindi’s Impenetrable Forest was.

In addition to dozens of new birds, we also saw other natural history curiosities. Firstly, I was impressed by how handsome many of the smaller shrubs of the forest were; somebody is going to wake up some day and introduce some of these into the horticultural trade. There were many small trees with gorgeous, unusual, colorful bark and foliage. We also got a couple of glimpses of the Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew, but I couldn’t make out any details. Another thing I liked was the ant colonies in the forest. I’d seen many snake holes while I was trailing Alex through the thorns and vines, and since everything in the forest looked like a snake to me, I was trying to be careful and, at the same time, not get left behind and lost. I finally asked Alex about all the snake holes, and he told me they were made by ants. That sounded like a lie a Kenyan would tell a paranoid tourist to calm him down, and I didn’t believe it for a second. A broom handle would have fit down these holes with a lot of room to spare.

Then we saw a group of ants coming out of one of the holes. At Entebbe, we’d seen a line of army ants that stretched as far as we could trace it, but the ants here at Arabuko use a different food-gathering strategy. They send out hunting parties of hundreds of ants, and the parties find food (like termites) and bring it back to the nest. Alex disrupted one of the hunting parties by blowing on it, and the whole group of ants began an aggressive, eerie, loud humming sound. Creepy.

David and I were wilting in the rising heat and lack of food since 5:30 am, but Alex was on a crusade for us and would not be dissuaded. A true zealot, he hustled us back to the car and told Ali to take us to a marsh in the park so we could identify some water birds. We sighed, drank some more water and, unable to offer resistance, acquiesced.

We were saved by the tide, though. Fortunately for us, the tide was high, so the birds weren’t there. Alex apologized profusely to us and told us to come back in the evening, when the tide would be out and when we could also see the rare Sokoke Scops Owl. We dropped him back off at the ranger station before making a beeline for something to eat at the Driftwood back in Malindi.

I let most of the rest of the day get completely away from me. I took a huge nap and spend the rest of the time reading a big chunk of Out of Africa while David frolicked in the surf and sun. I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that Out of Africa is just not a very good book. It’s interesting in a way, but I started it when I was here last year, and I’m still reading it. And I’m a fast reader. I’ve been patient through the lack of a story, but when Part 4 started citing snippets from Dinesen’s diary, that was the end. I’m sure this part was just added because Dinesen’s editor told her the book was too short to publish. I will persevere, but I want to read Middlesex, which both David and Linda said was a good read.

After I finally ventured out of our cabin into the light – about 5 pm – David and I took a walk down the beach to see what was happening. I really like the ocean on this coast. The water is very shallow for a quarter mile out to a reef, and it changes color with the time of day. As the huge sun was getting low over the reef breakers, the shallow water near us was turning from turquoise to a deeper purple while the sky was pink and bright purple. Great. We then noticed clouds of swallows over the beach which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be bats! Hundreds and hundreds of bats. This looked so unusual that we went up the beach further to see where they were coming from. It looked like they were coming from under the shingles of the roof of a single big house on the beach. Malindi has a lot of vacation homes built by Italians (it’s a sort of Italian Puerto Vallarta), and this house looked well-maintained but empty. For that reason, a veritable city of bats was taking flight from there and across the shallow water toward the reef.

The rest of the night was equally restful. Walking to dinner, we saw an unusual creature in the flower bed, so we chased it into a hole that was too small for it. When it couldn’t get in, David pulled it out by its tail, and it hissed at him and rolled itself into a ball. I then poked it with my finger and got royally stabbed. It was the sharpest little hedgehog I’ve ever gotten stuck by. We left it in its ball state, growling a high-pitched, cute little growl.

We then had a fine dinner sitting outside and watching big bats sweep regularly into the hotel lights, occasionally stopping and hanging upside down on a palm tree.