A pristine gem where legends live

The sun is bright and warm. The ocean is the bluest of blue—it winks and sparkles. The beach is soft like powder and warm like a lover’s whisper.

The waves lap against your bare feet. This is the Indian Ocean and it’s soothing and frothy. There are no birds in the air, but who cares?

Who needs birds when you are standing at one of the best beaches in Africa and possibly in the world; Diani Beach.
You are standing there looking into the ocean, marvelling at how blue a water can be, how beautiful a beach can get, how amazing craftsman the Lord can be.

Beach boy talk

It’s the low season, which means the stretch of beach is pretty much yours. Yours and a few tourists and maybe two vendors selling madafu (coconut juice) and wooden keyholders that you have bought a hundred times before because you want to support the youth of the coast.

This is the point of this story where if you are a hotelier you should move closer and read this part keenly because sometimes something happens when you stand there at the beach.

A waif beach boy with red reflective “Peter-Tosh” sunglasses ambles by carrying shells in a dodgy worn basket and says, “ Vipi kaka, uko freshi?” You say, “Niko sawa.” He says, “Umetoka Nairobi?” You say yes, you are from Nairobi.

You proceed to make small talk (Swahili people can extend small talk for eternity if you let them) and then when he sees you looking at the beach bandas in the property not too far from you, he says that next time you come back to Diani you should try staying at Diani Reef Beach Resort and Spa.

Where legends live

You shift your weight to the other leg, turn your face away from the sun and ask him why? He says because it is fantastic, that it was built by Israelis in the 60s and then taken over by former president Daniel Moi and then taken over by someone called Bobby Kamani and his family. He says legend lives in the hotel.

He says he knows a man who sculptured a massive artwork of a woman with her children curled along that tree.

He keeps talking as you walk and when you get to the entrance of your hotel you tell him you are actually staying at Diani Reef Resort and he laughs and slaps your back for your shrewdness.

Hotels might write what they want on websites, take as many illusional pictures as they can or visit as many tourism trade fairs as they want to sell their products.

But unbeknownst to them, word from someone as impartial (and unexpected) as a beach boy could be one of the most powerful marketing tools.

If I wasn’t staying at Diani Reef Beach Resort and Spa I would have certainly made a point to stay there and see the legend that lives in there.

He didn’t lie about the hotel. It’s a wonderful property. It sits on a coral reef. Literally. If you stand before one of their two swimming pools and face the resort, you will see how it’s perched on this massive coral reef. It’s as if it sprung from the reef itself.

There is a tree with roots that grabs desperately at the coral reef, long roots like an octopus’ tentacles run around the roof, searching for water underground. Cinematic. There are a dozen or curved wooden bridges, running over streams with fishes with their mouths at the surface of the water, gasping at you.

The interior decor, done by Daisy Kamani, is masterful, tasteful and borders on the minimalist.

She doesn’t go gaga with it, avoiding kitsch, experimented with fabrics and moods, but never going overboard with colours.

She uses soft coral colours on walls that are textured into shapes of sea urchins, she builds wooden frames and showcases unique shells in them on walls and she drops down on the walls, what looks like dhow mast fabrics.

She imports paintings from Europe and then asks a South African called Daphne Butler to create others, she then gets local sculpture artists to carve their stories on wood and pots racy-looking plants that look like elephant ears and then lets big potted urns run along the corridors creating a wonderful symmetry.

But she isn’t done.

Indulging

Daisy goes East on their fans outside their restaurant with oriental wooden fans that chop the humid Ukunda air like an out of shape Kung Fu master. When she sees open spaces Daisy doesn’t rush to fill them with art.

She let’s them breath on their own. She gives the guests room to possess the property, to have space to indulge in the work of her hands.

When dusk falls you have to go see this over 200-year-old Baobab tree and how it lights up clever lighting. You can sit and see it from their Zebra bar that played Rhumba music the night I say there having whisky that wasn’t as exorbitant as I had imagined it would be.

The barman told me there was a disco, a soundproof disco. I didn’t bother; I’m 38, I don’t do discos anymore. I’m the bar kind of man; I sit at the counter and I drop ice cube into my whisky.

But all these isn’t even the greatest strength of Diani Reef Resort and Spa. They could say it’s the awards their scooped for being the leading spa resort in Africa (2015) by World Travel awards.

They could gloat about their CEO—Titus Kangangi— being ordained by the CEO Global Awards recently, or that they are the only property with a fully-fledged movie theatre (a 42-seater) or even the fact that they are the only property in the street of that room capacity (143 rooms) where you can access every part of the hotel without using an umbrella should it rain.

These are all great, but I think their truest strength is their beach; 450 meters of it. Most properties will sell their beach to visitors even though they only have a waterfront or sit behind a cliff.

Diani Reef Resort and Spa literally spills into a beach. If you ever visit and you don’t spend much time at their beach then you would have missed the soul of the resort.

The legend the beach boy talked about isn’t even inside the hotel, it’s right there on their beach.