Footloose at the Flamboyant
The flamboyant splurges red-hot flowers with flaming oranges on the petals. It’s a delicate flower for the tough trees but in the hot weather with the brilliant blue skies and the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean, it adds vivid colours. It lends its name to the deliciously beautiful boutique hotel, The Flamboyant.
A colobus sits on the old tree in the garden very much at home. It’s the Angolan colobus monkey different from those black and white ones found in the old forests of Mount Kenya and other highland areas where the ancient forests still exist. At one time, when the Equatorial rain forest stretched across the continent, the Angolan colobus were common.
Today, special colobus bridges stringed across Diani road allow for the rare primate to safely cross the road from above, to feed on whatever patches of indigenous trees they can find.
A troop of vervet monkeys saddle up the frangipani tree with its pink flowers and a clutch of helmeted guinea fowls make a noisy entrance from next door.
The garden sprawls past the century-old baobab of our beautiful beach home called the Baobab to the swaying palms watching over the powder white beach that Diani is so famous for.
It’s a beautiful old house built in the 1970s – a simple, unpretentious white double storey house with three bedrooms upstairs facing the ocean and one downstairs. A huge kitchen leads to the shaded patio with a baraza to relax on and have meals. The living room inside is a welcome relief when the sun gets a trifle too hot.
Anderson, the cook calls the fishermen on his cell phone and early in the morning, the man appears with a basket full of seafish including lobster which Anderson proceeds to turn into a mouth-watering lobster thermidor served for dinner.
I meanwhile languidly stretch on the baraza waiting for the tide to flow in. It’s too much work to walk to the beach at low tide with the scorching sun.
But my neighbours at Flamboyant have a swimming pool – a gorgeous freeform pool with bar stools immersed in it for cool cocktails while in the pool. I mean, how much cooler can this get?
Kite surfers enjoy the wind on the ocean, their kites showing from the patio. George Barbour aka Ali Barbour of Ali Barbour’s Cave Restaurant built this family home in 1979 followed by the cave dining.
The ‘big’ house as it was called before it transformed into the elegant Flamboyant Boutique Hotel was very much a family home for the Barbours. George remembers the architect presenting a plan for the house, which he did not comprehend.
So hea sked for a detailed model. Driving with the model on the car seat, George had to slam on the brakes to avoid smashing into a cow. The result: the roof slipped forward, creating an overlapping roof, which ‘looked better’ according to George. Sitting under it, it doubles as a wide shade on the patio.
Canvas paintings in bold colours of simple subjects like Swahili khangas hanging on the clothesline and a pair of flip flops left on the sand decorate the white walls of the Flamboyant.
The living room leads into the inner courtyard where a shallow pool is surrounded by lush plants. Kikois as colouful as the flamboyant cover the cushions.
Spiral staircases lead to the ensuite master bedrooms on the upper floor.
The suites are named after the great men and women of Africa like the indomitable Wangari Maathai, Kenya’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the great African orator who spoke for freedom and equality, the late Patrice Lumumba.
The snooker room on the ground floor is a rich repository of George’s younger days when he competed in the East African Rally when real men and women raced across the roughest of roads in their own cars through the untamed African bush.
Apart from ‘bundu-bashing’, other pictures show George as a rugby player where he also captained the national rugby teams in the 1970s.
It’s a passion he’s carried to the beach where he is the founder of ‘touch rugby’ and hosts the Diani Beach International Touch Rugby now in its third year.
The five-a-side touch rugby is even played at night on the sandy beach.
The tournament is a fund raiser for the Rugby Age Grade Programme run by the Kenya Rugby Football Union and the Rugby Patrons Society, to take 600 kids into rugby, to develop their skills for the game and prevent them from falling into drugs or becoming street children.
By Rupi Mangat
