Diani Beach

The sand is so white it stings your eyes before the water gets a say, and so fine it squeaks under bare feet like fresh snow. Overhead, black-and-white colobus monkeys swing through the canopy with an acrobat's indifference, trailing long white tails. The Indian Ocean arrives in warm, shallow waves across a reef flat that turns the shallows into a turquoise sheet.

Diani runs white along Kenya's south coast, a fringing reef calming the Indian Ocean into a lagoon that stretches, chest-deep and warm, hundreds of metres from shore. Behind the sand, remnant coral-rag forest holds Angolan colobus monkeys — the conservation trust based on the strip strings rope bridges over the beach road so the troops can cross safely. The trade winds turn the lagoon into a kite-surfing run in season, snorkelling begins where the sand ends, and the World Travel Awards have crowned Diani Africa's leading beach destination again and again. Mombasa sits up the coast via the Likoni crossing; nothing about this water hurries you back there.