Mike Kennedy’s story of how he made his way up to his personal Shangri-La, Kiwayu Island.
“Back in 1987, I was working with an oil exploration company based out of Mombasa but was looking for an opportunity to leave them to set up my own business. I was living in Watamu at the time with my girlfriend and our local watering hole was Ocean Sports Bar and whenever we were hanging out there I would always look at this map of the Kenyan Coast on the wall. And when I looked at this map I would always be drawn to this island located North of Lamu, called Kiwayu. It had such a ring to it; Kiwayu, Kiwayu, Kiwayu, that I felt that it was calling to me. One night I was having some drinks at the bar with a group of friends and in the quest for adventure and after having a few too many, we decided on the spot at 4am, to go and find this mysterious island. So the four of us jumped on to two motorbikes and an open Suzuki jeep, dropped by our homes to tell our girlfriends that we were going on safari and that we would be away for five or six days, picked up our clothes and some supplies and roared off at dawn, heading north.
And boy, was it some journey! It happened to be an El Nino year with flooding all over Kenya and wherever we went bridges and roads were washed away. Crossing the Tana River was a real challenge because we had to build our own bridges from washed away planks of wood. We kept going north from Lamu, heading to Kiunga which is on the Kenya- Somali border and eventually, after a few grueling days, reached a river called Mungai where we found that the bridge had been washed away. We tried to float the jeep across on empty drums of petrol but half way across the jeep sank and we had to spend five days camping on the side of the road waiting for the river to subside. Eventually it did and we pushed the jeep out but could not get it going, so with the remaining two motorbikes we drove into Kiunga to get help. On reaching Kiunga, we were promptly arrested by the border police and thrown into cells as we were sporting bushy beards, splattered with mud and had no identification, so they probably thought we were terrorists. It took them two days to verify who we were after numerous radio calls to Nairobi. On being released we continued on the bikes down the coast road to a little village called Mkokoni which is opposite Kiwayu Island. From there we hired a small dhow to cross over to the island, where we spent the next four days eating crab and swimming and body surfing in the crystal clear sea.
‘Guys, I think that we have uncovered a real gem here! An amazingly beautiful, wild and unspoiled paradise,’ is what we kept saying to each other and we promised to ourselves that we would be back again as soon as possible. By this time two weeks had gone by and our girlfriends had reported us missing to the police as there were no mobile phones in those days for us to be able to communicate with them. We hitched a lift on the police boat back to Lamu with the two bikes onboard (we had left the jeep in Kiunga but the story of how we rescued it six months later is another tale) and it took us another week to get back to Watamu. You can imagine that after three weeks away and a lot of worry our girlfriends were very happy to see us return!
After visiting on one the guys from that trip (Charlie, who had actually got there before me by taking a job at a small hotel which had just been built on the south end of the island) I hatched a plan to stay in the archipelago. So I set up a marine safari business, based out of Lamu, sailing adventurous guests around all the islands, camping, fishing, snorkeling, game viewing and exploring ancient ruins. An average trip would be a week to ten days and we would always finish off the safari by spending the last three or four days on Kiwayu island. After doing this for four years I decided to build a more permanent camp on Kiwayu, so in 1991, I started building my first ‘bandas’ and in July 1992 I opened for business. I have been here on this blissful island ever since and have enjoyed every glorious moment.
