Sand Dunes behind Shela Village on Lamu, Kenya

When I first arrived on Lamu and was just getting settled, our host took us on a little tour through the sand dunes to the other side of the island. We headed through some small alleys at the end of the village to a climb through some shrubs and first caught a glimpse of the end of the village where we were staying.


The path continued on, over the crest which must have been the highest elevation of the dunes.


A bit further up off to our left, you could see the inlet to the Indian Ocean and the neighboring island that's mainly tidal mangrove swamps. The clouds were really striking. It's hard to capture their exact quality with a camera (or at least with my camera!)

Heading down on the other side, the Indian Ocean side of the island, the following picture was our view:


It was explained that the castle structure was the home of a rich person and it was only built in the last few years. Although it's hard to assess from the the picture, it was still actually relatively removed from the waterline. But our guide (and host) also pointed out the sandbar to us and said it was possible to swim out to it. Thus began the little adventure of the day, or possibly weekend (that is if the whole trip wasn't an adventure!).

We (five of us) swam out in the direction of the sandbar which didn't seem that far... As we reached it, there was no gradual slope of sand edging up to it, just all of a sudden we came up against it and almost had to climb onto it like climbing out of a pool. We took in the scenery for a while out there, and then decided to head back. After a bit of swimming we realized why there was no gradual slope approaching the sandbar: the flow of water exiting out to the sea washes most of it away. It was this stream of water we had to swim against to get back! Luckily we were all O.K. enough with our swimming skills to get the job done. I later heard this was also shark territory. Yikes! That's enough adventure for me in one day.

We headed back to the tower where we were staying and they had a really wonderful dinner prepared in the garden. There was fish, also calamari, rice cooked with coconut, salad, and no shortage of limes to squeeze juice onto everything, which I found great! I ended my evening in an old wooden bed curtained in by mosquito netting with a smoking ember-type coil underneath to assist in keeping the little blood-suckers away!