Kara's in Kenya travel blog: In the good way

If you're camping in California or elsewhere in the U.S. and you see a sign that says, "Don't leave ANY food in your tent or bears will eat you," it's not a joke. Don't leave ANY food in your tent, or bears will eat you.

I suppose we should have paid similar heed to the signs warning us not to leave ANY food in our cabin at Diani Beach last weekend. But we felt pretty safe, ensconced in mosquito netting and wooden slats, and hey, apples don't really smell that pungent, do they? Apparently, yes; to monkeys they do. Which is why we woke up on Sunday morning to a Colobus monkey sitting on the cross-beam of our roof, eating an apple, and pooping all over the floor.

Don't leave ANY food in your cabin. Lest the monkeys consume and poop.

We also learned that politely saying, "Go on, Monkey. You need to please leave now. Just throw your apple out the window ahead of you and then go after it," doesn't work. (N of 1 = proof!).

Luckily, that was the day we were leaving, so we didn't have to spend a weekend with excrement, and the rest of the time was quite lovely.

The requisite dawn flight to the coast. Over Mt. Kilimanjaro.

At the Kenyan coast, you can be as lazy or as active as you want, and this weekend I was lazy. So lazy the trip can be summed in 5 words: sun, sand, ships, swimming, seafood. Or, simply, sloth. In the good way. And that meant that it was all about the beach:

Splashing along the shallow tides.

Sinking steeply into soft white sands.

We bought some wine, bread, and cheese and took it out to sea in a glass-bottomed boat, dropping anchor at a sandbar several hundred meters from shore and splashing about in the knee-deep water. We touched and befriended huge pincushion starfish and creepy-crawly spider star-fish. We kept wide berth from some sea urchins. We lay on the sand reading as camels traipsed by. We ate fresh prawns from the Indian Ocean and attended a James Bond party on the beach.