Destination: MALINDI, Kenya

In motor-free wooden sailboats, called dhows, Kenyan fisherman leave at sunset for a night spent catching fish, in Malindi, on Kenya's coast.

Tourist town suffering from Kenya's bad rep

When Joan Rutherfoord Goodhart first came to Malindi on vacation in 1943, the floor of the Holmes Hotel was made of packed-down earth.

Half a century later, Malindi boasts dozens of comfortable, intimate hotels with thatched roofs, airy rooms and luxurious vegetation. Game fish are plentiful, and the millions of brightly colored fish that dart in and out of a long coral reef make the area a snorkeling and scuba diving paradise.

But most of the rooms stand empty, and boats to the reef are idle.

The steady decline in the number of tourists to Malindi and Kenya's entire Indian Ocean coast since 1990, capped by this season's precipitous drop, is a tale of complacency, government mismanagement, corruption -- and sometimes, an unfamiliarity with Kenyan geography.

"It never was a smart sort of place," says the 79-year-old Goodhart, a resident since 1982 who tries to go snorkeling every other day.

Nevertheless, she says, Malinda had been a magnet since the mid-1960s for hundreds of thousands of British, German, Swiss and Italian tourists on the strength of its relaxed atmosphere and proximity to Kenya's reknown game reserves.

Ann Robertson of the Malindi Museum Society says the town has been on the map for centuries, first as a market and trading post in the complex network of Indian Ocean commerce.

She led efforts to use the commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the April 15 arrival of Vasco da Gama at the head of a Portuguese fleet en route to India to boost Malindi's flagging image.

"Malindi has had its ups and downs, but this certainly has been the lowest low," says the Museum Society's treasurer, Korinna Spyratos, whose husband is a local building contractor.

Government tourism officer J.Z. Machuka says 90 percent of the town's population of about 30,000 depends on tourism for their livelihood.

"Everyone suffers when there are no tourists," he says. "Here there is no industry. It's not like Mombasa."

But East Africa's major port, 75 miles south of Malindi, is also affected by the absence of tourists, who shun its historic but potholed and garbage-strewn streets.

The Kenyan coast, which receives 60 percent of all tourists to the East African nation, began to experience a decline in visitors during the 1991 Gulf War, which put a chill on tourism around the world.

And, like rest of Kenya, the coast suffers from government neglect, particularly its failure to maintain roads, power grids and the telephone system. Hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for repair of highways and other infrastructure have been siphoned off by corrupt officials.

Kenyan tourism has also been seriously affected by the opening up of new safari destinations in South Africa and Tanzania and sun spots in the Caribbean.

But a series of politically motivated inter-ethnic attacks on the coast south of Mombasa last August that left 88 dead dealt the industry a staggering body blow, although no tourists were targeted. And no attacks occurred in Malindi, about 100 miles north of the scene of the violence.

"Things had been iffy for three or four years, and last August, most hotels were looking at the best season for 10 years," says Elsa Friman, owner of Scorpio Villas. She says people were putting aside Gulf War fears and beginning to remember how nice Malindi was.

The government of President Daniel arap Moi was quick to blame the international media's reporting on the attacks for the avalanche of cancellations at the beginning of the 1997-98 tourist season.

"People overseas did read about it (the attacks), but they have no idea of geography. I think they don't realize how big Africa is; they think it is just a dark continent," Spyratos says.

Maybe things will pick up in the upcoming July-April season, "if nothing else happens," Friman said.

Jim Flannery, a technical adviser to the semi-official Kenya Tourist Board, says both the government and people in the tourism industry had been complacent when Kenya was the only game in town.

"Kenya was not marketed. It depended on tour operators, and Kenya was undisturbed by real competition ," Flannery said at the recent launch of a publicity campaign in Europe to woo tourists back.

Fishermen such as Ali Mohamed, who inherited his wooden dhow with a lateen sail from his father, would also like to see tourists return.

But, setting off in the early dusk for a night at sea, he said fishermen can at least survive as they have always done.

"We like tourists, but we don't starve, no matter what happens to tourism."


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