PEPONI HOTEL

 

A Prose That Self Describes The Qualities Of Peponi By John Hemmingway

Peering through one teakwood door at Peponi Hotel, one faces the Swahili world. Opening the other, one hears the tide bursting on a coral reef and feels the first flush of trade winds. The Peponi commands a headland between the world of traditional peoples and a lonely sea. To the southwest, lies an eight-mile stretch of soft sands that the locals call crowded if ten people, in all its length, is visible.

To the northwest towers, the great sand dune where the bleached bones of the dead of a battle 175 years ago still surface when a brisk blows. Two miles due north lies Lamu, a small Arab town still ignorant of cars. Palaces made of coral encompass the streets, just wide enough for one fully laden donkey to pass. Swahili women, dressed in black buibuis, their hands painted with henna, sometimes can be heard singing behind shuttered windows. In the evening old sea captains converge on the wide plaza of the harbor, sit on the canons facing the sea, and talk of storms.

 

Peponi is a resolution of all safaris in East Africa. It is the journey's exclamation point, a retreat from hubbub where one can make sense of a fast life and its senseless details. Here is where I learn to redress myself on a first-name basis.

 

There are too many luxury hotels around our world and they offer the same; a chocolate on the pillow, a canned romance and a cuisine called haute because it's spelled in French. Peponi Hotel stands apart from them all for integrity to place. Architecture, views, beach, dining, sounds; smells are all exhilarating surprises, unique to this coast, this culture, Africa. Yes, you come here to be pampered, but at Peponi, luxury is the engine not the destination.

 

The truth is Peponi 'happened'. It was a house that grew into a hotel, an idea that little by little, took shape from its sea-mad proprietors. An entire village looks to Peponi as its watering hole, its nexus of entertainment, its fountain of gossip. Throughout the decades, I've been coming, Peponi has benefited from this popularity; it has gained and regained inspiration from the surrounding culture it celebrates. It is life's exception; a place that is both luxurious beyond one's dreaming and innocent of all pretence.

 

If I want to escape, I close my eyes, and dream of Peponi; swimming at dawn on the world's most beautiful beach, mornings in which I can bombard myself with discoveries; Islamic/Swahili history, dhow culture, natural history above and below the very blue sea, eccentric expatriates joining me in the bar for scrapping of fried coconut, glasses of lime juice (Believe me Lamu limes are different from any others), dinner distinguished by a plethora of new ways of celebrating seafood with ginger, lime and garlic. A staff that is ultra-attentive but never obsequious, day's end in a bedroom designed for the play of the evening winds. When you go, pick your traveling companion well. Peponi is not to be wasted.

 

From Harpers and Queen - 300 Best Hotels Of The World

"Peponi is simple, fresh, friendly, cheerful and everything about it is totally original and genuine neither frozen foods here nor frozen smiles."

 

From The Sunday Times

"Peponi, one of the greatest little hotels of the world and unquestionably the place to stay on Lamu."

 

From The New York Times

"After we lurched into flight, I looked down at Lamu and wondered why we had been in such a hurry to leave. We remembered that they would be having giant prawns in butter sauce for dinner at the Peponi."

 

From The City And Country Home

"Listening to the music of the night and getting sand between my toes during the day amounted to, in the end, an easy surrender to the realization that the place had gently but firmly kidnapped me".