The mzungus can't get enough of it if you say 'peace and love' often enough and charge four times the going rate for pot. Leonardo's idyll of a perfect, empty beach, though, is a lie, a ridiculous conceit. Sometimes the beach here causes a sensory overload that's almost unbearable - it's hard to decide what to look at next as the setting sun illuminates the seaweed beds with a weird orange glow, transparent crabs scuttle out of their holes towards the water and the children run makeshift cars in circles, shouting. Everything happens on the beach. It's a main road, supermarket, bicycle repair shop, barber's salon, creche and pickup joint all rolled into one.
Boys play with model dhows.
In the evenings the small boys of the village race painstakingly constructed model dhows along the seashore. They're made with infinite care during long afternoons in the shade, perfect in every detail with sails stitched together from old carrier bags and tiny names painted on the side. The tiny craft scoot along the shallows with surprising speed and the boys pound after them, dodging the old women plodding out of the sea with bags of seaweed on their heads. Seaweed here is harvested to be dried and sold - at low tide all you see along the horizon is a row of bent backs as the beds are stripped bare within the corral of sticks, like a watery paddock, that reaches far out into the ocean. At night, groups of up to twenty or thirty gather along the beach on little stools to drum or sing Tarab music and dance ecstatically around a fire.