Serena Beach Hotel & Spa, Kenya

The beach-front Hotel was lovely but the weather was not – it rained almost every day, and often for large parts of the day too, so the ‘lounging on the beach’ bit of the holiday was not really satisfied…! Diving was good as always but the poor weather meant that underwater visibility was a bit rubbish, particularly on Friday, when it was down to about 15 feet: we still managed to see a lot of stuff thanks to the local knowledge of our dive guide, you just had to get up close…! On the final Monday the water was a lot clearer and we had two excellent drift dives over some beautiful coral gardens: saw a couple of Turtles, a WhiteTip Reef Shark (I missed that, dammit!) a HUGE lobster, some big Moray Eels, Groupers, a BatFish, a StoneFish… Plus the usual shoaling reef-fish, AngelFish, ParrotFish, various TriggerFish, TrumpetFish etc etc…

Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures because a) poor visibility underwater and b) we had our room burgled Friday evening whilst we were having dinner

We’d put everything of value in the Safe as instructed but the room was broken into and they took the entire safe: Wallets, phones, both Cameras and Dive Computers, and of course Passports… So we spent Friday night liaising with Hotel Staff and Police and calling the UK to cancel Bank Cards, Phones etc etc. We weren’t sure if we’d be able to go on safari the next day but The Hotel’s General Manager kindly offered to provide anything we needed, and said he’d contact the Consulate about replacement Passports, so we got to bed about 1am, and were up early to be picked up by our Safari driver at 5am…! A tiny bit stressed and tired 😉

The Safari trip was great and it was better than moping around the hotel over the weekend, so am glad we didn’t miss out. Bizarrely, on Saturday we had a call from the hotel to say that passports and bank cards had been returned: the robber had despatched a bike-rider to Hotel with instructions to hand over a brown envelope containing everything he couldn’t easily sell, and he even called the Hotel later to make sure they’d received it…!! The Police Chief thought this was rather extraordinary behaviour but we were at least grateful to be able to fly home…

The Hotel have been fantastic – we had absolutely no access to cash but they moved us to a nice bigger room and insisted we ate in the posh restaurant on Monday evening; we just charged everything to the room and it was all taken care of. On Monday we gave statements to the Police and the General Manager said they would fully compensate us for everything we’ve lost, regardless of the fact we have Travel Insurance. He also promised us VIP Treatment the next time we visit any one of the group’s hotels in Africa, so we felt like Royalty by the time we came to leave! They really couldn’t have been nicer.

More pics here on Flickr…