Was there ever a more romantic island than Lamu? It lies in the Indian Ocean, perched just two degrees above the equator. All that separates it from the Kenyan mainland is a broad channel; a slither of midnight-blue water running through the mangroves. Yet Lamu exists in its own parallel world. Nowadays you can fly there from Nairobi in 80 minutes, but the moment you touch down on neighbouring Manda Island, you are stepping back into the age of Sinbad. Here, on the burning rim of Africa, is a rickety wooden jetty, and at the end of it, a sailing dhow, waiting to take me on the ten-minute ride across the water. In the stern, as if too lazy to lift his hand, the skipper steers the tiller with his bare foot, heading out into the tideway towards Lamu's low-profile waterfront of coconut palms and flat-roofed houses.
In many ways, Lamu is like a smaller version of Zanzibar, but with the added bonus of being simply the best known of a string of islands stretching north towards Kiwayu Safari Village and the Kiunga Marine National Reserve. This luminous world, half sea, half sky, is divided by low horizons of dunes and mangrove creeks, live turtles, pelicans, dugongs and whale sharks. From time to time, lions roam its lonely shores and sometimes elephants still wade across its sandy channels to next-door island Manda.
A mile and a half beyond Lamu Town, where the channel curves to meet the open sea, the bone-white minaret at Shela village comes into view. This is where we are heading. As we come alongside the jetty at the Peponi Hotel, small boys leap and dive into the clear water while a barefoot villager wearing his sarong-style wraparound kikoi steps forward to carry my bags ashore. "Jambo! Karibu!" he says, "Hello! Welcome!"
If I had to list my ten favourite hotels, Peponi's would come somewhere near the top. The name means "where the wind blows", and its position on the shore, between the sandhills and the sea, is designed to catch every last whisper of the monsoon breezes. My room, cool and simple as a cave, has high, beamed ceilings. The stone steps outside lead past a terrace where the black snouts of ancient cannons still point across the water and down to the beach. In the hotel gardens, heavy with the scent of frangipani, bee-eaters call from the Nandi flame trees, and in the restaurant - where you can dine barefoot if you wish, in your best kikoi - you'll understand why decades of Nairobi expats and up-country game wardens have flocked to Peponi's to feast on mangrove crab bisque and tuna carpaccio.
Back in the 1960s, Lamu was something of a hippy hangout with the same streetcred as Katmandu. Ever since, the island has attracted a colourful coterie of drifters and romantics, refugees from the outside world for whom its remoteness and laid-back attitude to life has made it an ideal sanctuary. As the years passed, its reputation spread. Lamu became an exotic bolthole for discerning travellers who came to wash off the dust of Kenyan game-park safaris in the Indian Ocean.
In 2001, Lamu town was designated a World Heritage Site. Even so, with its open drains and braying donkeys, Kenya's oldest inhabited town is a unlikely holiday choice for the A-list. There is only one car on the entire island and dhows are the only public transport. Besides, this corner of Africa follows the way of Islam, with a dress code that requires decorum and a score of mosques broadcasting the call to prayer five times a day.
Nevertheless, the word is well and truly out. Lamu is the hottest new destination in East Africa. Property prices are soaring as the jet set move in, snapping up crumbling coral houses and transforming them into palatial Swahili-style villas with poolside swing beds and rooftop dining rooms. Celebrities who have fallen under Lamu's spell include Princess Caroline of Monaco and her husband, Prince Ernst August of Hanover, who have three villas and a beach house at Shela. Then there's Gillian Anderson of The X-Files , Kim Cattrall of Sex and the City - and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood has holidayed on next-door Manda.
