The Beach of My Memories

This is the beach of my fondest memories, a classic East African beach with its coral sand scattered with flotsam and backed by ranks of coconut palm and casuarina. It isn't a pristine beach, and is all the better for it. It has lines of flotsam and weed left by the falling tide, though sudden accumulations can sometimes cover it in rotting heaps; it will have the carcasses of whatever has died in the lagoon in the last few days, or died out in the ocean and has been washed ashore; and along many of its stretches it will be a working beach with delicate ngalowa canoes moored offshore or pulled up onto the sands, with all the debris that fishermen leave.

Wander along it and you'll find seashells like the one on the left, Janthina janthina the violet sea-snail, whose bubbly float enables it to sail the oceans but which, when crushed underfoot, produces a rich purple dye. Pick up the remains of spirula (right), the internal shell of a deep-water cephalopod, or fragments of rare red coral, or wood which, judging by its covering of barnacles, has wandered for months across the Indian Ocean; or find strange seeds, like the donkey-eye Mucuna bean.

Stand at the back of the beach and look past the leaning palm, undermined by a high storm tide, gaze out across the lazy blue-greens of the shallow lagoon to the white teeth of an ocean breaking far out across a fringing reef.

When the tide is low at springs, wearing a pair of old shoes and carrying a stick, wander out across the lagoon between the coral heads....

....to the reef. It is formed of layer upon layer of corals which have built up until their heads poked above the level of the sea, when they died. It looks a barren landscape but the pools between the dead corals teem with life.

This could be any of a hundred beaches along the East African coast but it happens to be on the east side of Zanzibar Island, near an hotel called Echo Beach. It has everything a beach should have. It's the perfect beach.... except.... over the years the coral pools have been pillaged for their more exotic shells to sell to tourists, so many of these beautiful reefs are pale shadows of what they were when, as a small child, I first knew them.