Chris McGreal in Mombasa
A week before his holiday on the Kenyan coast, David Galpin eyed the British Foreign Office warnings and decided he did not want to risk it. But his tour company assured him the reports of rampant killings and ethnic cleansing were overblown. Besides, they said, he would lose more than R15 000 of his deposit if he cancelled.
Within days of arriving at Mombasas Shelly Beach Hotel, Galpin was standing over the body of someone elses dead child after an evening sheltering with his family from bullets as a marauding gang hacked the hotels Maasai dancers to death and burnt down the bar at its gates.
A few days earlier Galpin, his wife and small child had arrived at the hotel to discover they were marooned in the deserted Mombasa district of Likoni. About 100 000 people have fled the area amid politically inspired violence which has claimed more than 50 lives over the past month and rocked the tourist industry.
Last weekend the mini-war came to the hotel, when a gang descended on the Shirloni Bar at the main entrance. The killers shot and hacked six people to death, including four Maasai dancers from the hotel and a two-year-old child.
As the Shirloni Bar was torched, Kenyans fled on to the hotels beach. Galpin was relaxing at the hotel bar with his wife and their 21-month-old son. We were frigging petrified. We heard the shooting. The next minute someone shouted, The pubs on fire. I came to my room to get some tablets and all I could hear was gunfire.
By then the beach was full of local people trying to hide. There was a young couple who just got married that day in the hotel. The guy freaked out. He said: I cant believe it, this is my wedding day and people are getting killed.
When you stood where they got married, you could hear the bullets whizzing around. Every time the shooting started, the hotel turned the disco music up.
The Shirloni Bar was popular with hotel guests as a venue they could safely walk to. The management even recommended it, and it stayed open long after midnight, when the hotel bar closed.
Galpins wife, Karen, shuddered at the thought they might have been in the Shirloni during the attack: We went to that bar several times. The barman here said they would have ushered the white people out before killing those other people. Which British person is going to stand back and let natives be slaughtered? Were not that kind of people.
The next day the hotels manager, Philip Jones, tried to reassure his guests. Galpin was not impressed. He stood up and said there isnt a problem. We said people have been killed. He said thats not confirmed, it was just a rumour and we shouldnt spread rumours.
But I saw the body of the two-year-old child with my own eyes. All that was left of it really was its head.
The Maasai dancers were in the pub having a drink before they came here to do their dancing. Wed seen them a few days before. They were pretty good. The thing that bugs me is these people were coming here to entertain us and four of them got killed. The managers attitude was, dont worry about it, well get another lot tomorrow.
Though no tourists have been hurt, the violence has bitten deep into Kenyas billion-rand tourism industry its biggest foreign-currency earner.
The port city draws visitors principally from Italy, Germany and Britain. Cancellations have risen dramatically and there have been few new bookings since the violence began a month ago.
Chairman of the Mombasa and Coast Tourist Association, Najib Balala, said the number of charter flights from Italy had fallen from five to one a week. The sole weekly charter flight brings only a handful of tourists.
Many tour companies are switching to Zanzibar. Some Mombasa hotels have closed, others have just one-third of their beds occupied at what should be the height of the season.
Galpin is angry because, while tourists from other countries and companies were allowed to switch destinations, he claims his tour operator Hayes and Jarvis said he would lose 75% of the cost of the holiday.
They said unless the Foreign Office said we mustnt go, weve got to go or lose our money. Two hours later, they offered us a holiday in Vietnam, but said we would still lose our deposit. Our argument is weve got a little baby. We didnt want to go anywhere where there was even a chance of trouble, he said.
The Foreign Office warned Brit-ish holidaymakers to be on the alert, but did not advise against travel to Mombasa. In contrast, the State Department in the United States has told its citizens to stay away from the area.