Things to do
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Lamu Fort
Omani builders finished this square fort in 1821 on what was then the shoreline, before reclamation pushed the sea back a block. Later use as a prison ran into the nineteen eighties. It now holds a library, an environmental exhibition and a courtyard used for public meetings, and the roof gives the clearest view over the rooftops.
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Lamu Museum
Housed in a former district commissioner's residence on the waterfront, the national collection covers Swahili material culture: siwa horns of carved ivory and brass, dhow rigging and models, and rooms furnished as a merchant household. An hour is enough for it. Staff can often arrange a visit to the Swahili House Museum nearby.
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Lamu Old Town
Listed by UNESCO in 2001, a Swahili settlement inhabited without a break since the fourteenth century runs on donkeys and dhows, its lanes too narrow for vehicles and its doors carved in Omani and Indian patterns. Walking is the only way through. Modest dress matters in a conservative Muslim town, and the seafront is where the day's news circulates.
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Manda Island
Across a narrow channel lie the airstrip, a scatter of beach lodges and the ruins of Takwa, a Swahili town abandoned in the seventeenth century and reached by boat through mangrove. Dhow trips pair the ruins with lunch on a sandbank. Departures are timed by the tide, which is why morning plans shift from one day to the next.
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Shela
Dunes and a long open beach begin at a village three kilometres south of the stone town, where restored houses and small hotels cluster behind a sixteenth century mosque. Swimming is safest at high tide, since the current runs hard at the channel mouth. Walking down along the shore takes about forty minutes at low water.