Diani Beach garden apartment

Diani Beach is the strip of white powder sand south of Mombasa that regularly gets voted Africa's best beach, and it deserves it: seventeen kilometres of blinding sand, a reef half a kilometre offshore holding back the swell, and a lagoon that glows an improbable turquoise at high tide. Behind the beach runs a green corridor of coastal forest with colobus monkeys in the canopy and a low-rise scatter of hotels, apartment compounds and villas. This two-bedroom ground-floor apartment sits in one of those compounds, six hundred metres back from the sand.

The unit runs to about 100 square metres with two en-suite bedrooms, an open kitchen and living room, and — the reason to take the ground floor — a private walled garden terrace big enough for a table, loungers and a hammock between two palms. Finishes are practical and coastal: ceramic tiles, high ceilings, ceiling fans, air conditioning in the bedrooms, mosquito screens and arched glazed doors to the garden. The compound has a swimming pool, mature gardens, borehole water, a backup generator, 24-hour security and a managing agent who will handle holiday letting when you are away — many owners here cover their running costs that way.

Foreign buyers in Kenya hold property on leasehold of up to 99 years, which is the norm for the whole coastal strip. Purchase runs through an advocate with a title search, sale agreement, stamp duty and registration, and typically takes two to three months. Service charges in a compound like this cover security, gardens, pool and water, and are modest by international standards. Diani has a deep pool of foreign and Nairobi-based owners, so both rental demand and resale are more liquid than most of the African coast.

The practical infrastructure at Diani is unusually good. There are supermarkets, a private hospital with a decompression chamber, pharmacies, banks, an international school, restaurants of every kind along Diani Beach Road and a proper cafe culture. Ukunda airstrip, ten minutes away, runs daily flights to Nairobi, and the new Dongo Kundu bypass has cut the Mombasa airport run to about an hour, avoiding the old Likoni ferry.

In the water, the reef makes everything easy: swimming is safe and warm at 26 to 29 degrees, snorkelling and glass-bottom dhow trips run to the reef and Kisite-Mpunguti marine park, and diving is excellent. Kitesurfing is world class in the Kaskazi and Kusi monsoon winds, roughly December to March and June to September, with several schools on the beach. Add skydiving over the lagoon, deep-sea fishing, the Shimba Hills reserve inland with its sable antelope and elephants, and Wasini Island dolphin trips, and Diani is about as complete as tropical beach living gets at this price.