The Observer - Shaanti Holistic Health Retreat, Kenya
07 October 2007
A health retreat with hippos by Rebecca Seal
A holistic retreat on Kenya's Indian Ocean coast offers the chance to combine wellbeing with wildlife.
It's 1am and I am being driven down an utterly dark road, somewhere south of Mombasa. Every now and then a person shows up in the headlights. My driver tells me they are walking home from work. 'But isn't that rather dangerous? Couldn't they get hit by cars?' His reply, somewhat dry, shuts me up: 'Well, as you can see, there is very little traffic. The greater risk is perhaps the lions, or actually the snakes.'
The rest of my holiday will be characterised by such extremes. I am travelling alone to a country which is lushly tropical in parts, ravaged by drought in others; where most of the population lives on almost nothing, but where Westerners come to play on white beaches and in warm seas.
My destination was Shaanti, a holistic health retreat. My package allowed me one treatment (such as Ayurvedic massage or reflexology) a day, plus all my meals and up to five hours of meditation, yoga and breathwork each day. What it didn't allow me was any meat, alcohol or cigarettes. Given that my London life had left me feeling distinctly toxic, this seemed perfect. I had 10 days to tone up, get a tan and detox, and in the middle of it all I would go on safari for three days.
Shaanti did turn out to be perfect. Its eight rooms sit in a garden full of coconut trees, facing a perfect white beach and an open-sided coconut-thatched pavilion housing the yoga platform, jacuzzi and steam room. The swimming pool, surrounded by bougainvillea, is behind it, where I learnt it was wise to tie your bag to your lounger or risk losing it to the black-faced colobus monkeys who also hang out there.
On my first night I slept though all the morning yoga classes, waking in time for my first outdoor vegetarian lunch (by myself) under a treehouse in the gardens, followed by an Ayurvedic massage. Then came a yoga class, followed by the most ridiculously marvellous experience: a star bath. It may never have occurred to you that the most relaxing thing you could ever do would be to have a hot bubble bath in a garden on the edge of a beach, surrounded by lanterns while you watch the stars come out. Then I was served dinner by the pool. I was asleep again by 9.45pm.
The next few days followed the same pattern. Obviously wrung out by being young, single and living in London (oh, the horror), I seemed to want to sleep all the time. Tasreen, a second-generation Kenyan of Ismaili descent and the director of the hotel, told me this wasn't unusual, and neither was my desire not to leave the grounds. 'Sometimes people just want to sleep and sleep, and often they don't want to go and explore. We have a lot of aid workers who come to stay from Congo or Sudan, and they don't want to see more; they want to feel safe here.' I'll stop whingeing about the hardships of living in London now, I think.
