Wednesday 24 Aug
And so finally a day of zero mammal watching and all relaxation… except we did just do one more forest walk in the morning by ourselves, in the hope of some elephant shrews. No joy. Oh, and one more bit of night spot-lighting on the main track. Argh! We are clearly addicts.
But apart from that, it really was all relaxation. Bit of a swim in the pool. Nice hour-long massage. Even more good food from the restaurant. Over dinner one night we ended up sitting with an American couple who are retired Hollywood directors (I had to look them up later: no-one famous, they provide second-unit direction for films using exotic animals). As usual, they liked talking an awful lot, so we mainly listened.
In the end we only took one walk on the beach, which seems baffling giving the gleaming white sand. But the Beach Masai were very off-putting. Every couple of hundred yards… certainly no more than five minutes… you are accosted by a friendly fellow in masai costume who wants to say hello, get to know you, where you from, how you doing, look here are these bead bracelets I make… this hat… these carvings. It’s tiring. It feels too nice and relaxed to be saying a brusque “no thanks, go away” to everyone, so you just accept a bit of a friendly chat in full knowledge that its just about finding the right spot to say “oh, no thanks we’ve got one/maybe later/we don’t need that, nice to meet you” and then maybe walking a bit faster to make it really super-clear.
And then repeat two hundreds yards later.
So, yeah, just the one walk along the beach and a bit of a splash in the sea. It’s very beautiful but doesn’t change very much whichever direction you head!
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