Abubilla Music

11.03.30-31 Singing Wells 5 Melindi to Diani

Written by Jimmy

We are reporting in detail on the Singing Wells Project at the Singing Wells website.  Here, we report on the behind the scenes ‘reality’ of what is happening.   This blog is a tale of two hotels.We survived our death trip to Melindi (See Blog 4) and checked into the Paradise Hotel.  We checked out after two nights and checked into the Indian Beach Club Hotel in Diani.   Paradise isn’t.  The Indian Beach club?  Except for the Kenyan-Irish dancing, fantastic.    Details:

• The Paradise Hotel.   Remember, it is very hot and very humid.   The Paradise Hotel is set in a compound, densely wooded, with gardens and winding paths between rooms, the open air bar and the open air restaurant.  There’s a pool.  Paradise?  Well, not exactly.     Let’s start with the pool.  It is warmer than warm bathwater.  Warm dirty bath water.   The bar serves cold Tuskers, which is awesome.  But no food, which is okay except the restaurant closes at 8PM (and you need to order by 6) and we have arrived back to hotel both nights after 8PM.    But these are mere quibbles and don’t actually matter.   The two very important phrases here are:  Toilet Water and Sex Tourism.   We can’t go into details here – court actions are pending.  But…  Our rooms had no air conditioning and had their own micro climate which was actually 2.4 times hotter and more humid then the already humid outside.   This allowed the behaviour of the toilets to grow life.    Lots of life.  When Jimmy flushed his toilet the bathroom floor filled with water.  To this day, he’s hoping that was a coincidence, but he never went back in the bathroom and used his tri-pod to lift his toiletries to safety.  When Tabu used his toilet it broke.   In pieces.  So the bathroom was sort of a no go zone for all of us, which is a bit unfortunate because that is where the shower was.     This meant all of us hung outside the whole time, moving between breakfast (which was actually quite good) and the open bar area.  And that is where we noticed something else.  A large number of Italian and German men with rotating queues of women.  We kept notes and their appeared to be 7 men and over the course of two days 23 women.  That was about 1.5 women per day per adult European male.    Milindi is known as the luxury beach where rich Italians (rumoured probably unfairly to be part of the Mafia), are know to retire and their wives are known to keep ‘beach boys’ during the months their husbands aren’t there.   We had a discussion and decided that the social system is alive and well.  While the heads of the mafia have private villas somewhere along the coast, we’re happy to report that their drivers and hit men have a bit of Paradise in Melindi.  Sweet.  As long as they stay outside.  We took no pictures.   We want no memories.  But to be fair, Malindi is lovely: 
• The Indian Beach Club in Diani: Determined to go use a bathroom, sleep inside the hotel room and avoid Sex Tourism, we searched mightily for new hotels on our next venture.   And we fell upon the Diani hotel.  Pictures will be enough I think: 

That’s it.  Please follow us at Singing Wells.   More to follow.

Jimmy