Watamu Marine National Park

Watamu Marine National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Watamu is a village of white beaches and coral coves on the Kenyan coast, two hours north of Mombasa and half an hour south of Malindi and its airport, and its marine park begins a few hundred metres offshore. The standard outing is two hours in a glass-bottomed boat, hired through the hotels or from the boatmen's association on the beach: out to the coral gardens at the right state of the tide, snorkelling over the bommies among fish accustomed to visitors, and back, with the Kenya Wildlife Service's marine park fee, payable electronically, added per person per day.

The longer day, which the coast calls a blue safari, begins with a run outside the reef to look for dolphins, continues with the snorkelling, and ends with a seafood lunch of grilled fish, crab and lobster on a sandbank or island in the mouth of Mida Creek, sometimes billed as Sudi or Sardegna island. Mida Creek itself is visited at high tide by dugout canoe or on foot along a rickety suspended boardwalk to a bird hide, both run by community groups whose guides know the waders. Diving, with several centres in the village, deep-sea fishing, for which Watamu has been famous since Hemingway's day, kitesurfing and whale-watching trips in season are the other sea activities, and the Local Ocean Conservation turtle rehabilitation centre welcomes visitors. The safaris to Tsavo East sold from Watamu and Malindi, a long day or two days, are a separate matter.

Visiting Watamu Marine National Park: what you will see

The marine national park was gazetted in 1968, with the Malindi park to the north among the first in Africa, a strictly protected ten square kilometres of lagoon and reef within a wider marine reserve where traditional fishing continues, the whole a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1979. A fringing reef runs parallel to the shore, and inside it, in a lagoon a few metres deep over white sand and seagrass, stand the coral gardens, a line of coral heads three hundred metres from the beach with more than 150 species of hard and soft coral, brain corals, staghorn, fans and sponges, and some five hundred species of fish: parrotfish, angelfish, butterflyfish, surgeonfish, snappers, groupers, lionfish, moray eels and octopuses, with the bleaching of 1998 and later years visible in the reef's patchwork of dead and recovering coral.

Green and hawksbill turtles feed in the lagoon, and green, hawksbill and olive ridley turtles nest on Watamu's beaches, where a local organisation pays fishermen to release those caught in nets and guards the nests, one of the conservation successes of the coast. Outside the reef, humpback whales migrate past from July to October, Indo-Pacific bottlenose and humpback dolphins are resident, and whale sharks and manta rays appear from October to March. Mida Creek, a tidal inlet of thirty-two square kilometres lined with mangroves, is a feeding ground for thousands of migrant waders from Eurasia, crab plovers, curlew sandpipers, greater sand plovers, and flamingos at times. Behind the village, the Arabuko-Sokoke forest, the largest coastal forest left in East Africa, has the golden-rumped elephant shrew and Sokoke scops owl, and the ruins of Gede, a Swahili town abandoned in the seventeenth century, stand in the forest's edge.

Watamu Marine National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open daily from 6 am to 6 pm, and trips are timed by the tide; low tide is best for the coral gardens. October to March, the season of the north-east monsoon, the kaskazi, has calm seas, clear water and the best snorkelling and diving, with the whale sharks; from April to June the long rains and the south-east wind stir up the lagoon, seaweed piles on the beaches and many hotels close;

July to September is cooler, windier and the time of the humpbacks. Wear a shirt in the water, since the equatorial sun burns backs in half an hour, and do not stand on the coral. Allow two or three days. Malindi's marine park and old town are half an hour north, Tsavo East is three hours inland, and Lamu is a short flight from Malindi.