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Peponi
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Room |
A Prose That
Self Describes The Qualities Of Peponi By John Heminway
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.
Other Reviews On Peponi Hotel:
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 no 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".
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