I was excited and a little on edge about heading to Nungwi and Kendwa. These are the two beaches on the northern and western part of the island. While undoubtedly beautiful, there was a reputation for theft. Theft from your hotel room, theft from hotel safes, theft on the beach… and, per usual, it was advised not to walk around at night. I tried to concentrate on the beauty of the scenery instead of the logistics of how I was going to go swimming with my laptop, camera, iphone, wallet- not leaving anything in the guesthouse room or on the beach for someone to walk away with. This concentration led to an experiment of photos taken from the dala dala window on our drive up. Some are a bit blurry, but I quite liked the watercolor-esque tone that the images took on.
We dropped several people off outside of different guesthouses and one fancy hotel where I lusted after the cool wet towel that was immediately handed to their new guest. One day I will be that kind of guest. One day…
Then we rolled up to the guesthouse Andrew had read about. It was close to the beach. It wasn’t a hotbox ON the beach. And there were sea-turtles. Unfortunately, upon first glance, it looked shabby. All of the warnings Andrew had read aloud to me about what to try to avoid clouded my judgement, the malaria meds got the best of me, and I immediately envisioned all of our things getting stolen and several nights of restless sleep for a price that simply made me angry. Not wanting to walk with our bags back into town, we decided to stay, and I continued to feel uncomfortable.
And then, as we waited for our room to be made up, we spotted the natural pool of water and the ten rescued sea-turtles swimming about within it. I watched, mesmerized by them. I took photos of the couple that stopped by to swim with them. We checked into our room and it was cool and clean. I felt better. But not good enough to leave my computer behind while we walked down to the beach.
We jumped in the water and marveled at how few chairs there were set up or people out enjoying the white sands and clear water. Beach boys bombarded us asking if we wanted to go snorkeling with them tomorrow, if we wanted the sunset cruise tonight, and even if we wanted something to smoke or snort… We said “No” and explained we were just there for the beach (and calamari for me, beer for Andrew).