The wintering season comes and goes, would have sung a Franco Battiato born in Watamu instead of Catania.
It comes in October and ends in late March.
Some Italic migratory birds, such as those ready for trans-Saharan migration, wait even until the first week of November.
Then, when temperatures drop and bills rise, they take off and land in Mombasa.
The wintering season lasts more or less the same as two tourist visas: three months + the three of renewal.
This, however, will be the first winter of a convincing comeback, after the pandemic years and convalescence, including restrictions and vaccination requirements.
Here they come, here they come!

A great migration that has nothing to do with that of wildebeests and zebras from the Kenyan savannah to Tanzania and back.
It is not a transhumance for survival, but rather a traverse towards a 180-day long pleasure, minute more, minute less.
When they get here, the hours of difference with the Old World are two, the colour shades are from cold storage white to antique pink (also due to the average age of the protagonists of the African adventure...).
They will return, roasted like prawns on the grill, with the last charters because after having done more or less nothing for all this time, they don't feel like making a 14-hour trip!

The more daring ones this year do not have too many alternatives to the Ethiopian company, except to find a cheap ticket with the Neos charter.
By now, for many of them the Addis Ababa airport is more familiar than an autogrill on the Milan-Ventimiglia road, even if instead of the Camogli there is the zighinì. Some of them already know a few sentences in Amharic, but on the other hand they still haven't learnt to speak a word of English.
In Malindi and Watamu, needless to say, the migratory mzungu are almost all compatriots, with a few scattered Swiss, French and German minorities.
There is even one from San Marino, it seems, but he is ashamed and does not tell anyone.
They are mostly pensioners (even this could have been left out) and therefore have no fixed dates or important deadlines.
The word 'commitments' for them usually corresponds to the word 'grandchildren'.
But the tribe of hibernators also includes those who recently no longer feel at home in Italy.
People who would like a simpler, less hectic life, if not exactly dream-friendly, at least in tune with less gloomy thoughts, with the general depression that hovers over the peninsula like one of those perturbations whose origin not even Edmondo Bernacca could explain.

So there are those who rent their only flat, the garage, the cellar, and would even sell their pain-in-the-ass aunt for scientific experiments if they could, doing their calculations right: "with what the heating costs me in the winter, I pay my rent in a residence with a swimming pool, with the fines, the IMU and other bullshit acronyms I pay for my food, and the rest is a tip, to the cleaning lady and the kid who brings me coconuts and mangoes every morning.
Six months of relaxation, six months of condescending climate and as many months of sea, iodine and beach boys.
In short, you can't have only joys...plus there are also those who have a few passions to satisfy: jogging, reading, snorkelling, fishing, nightclub hunting.
And there are those who are so abstinent of affection, partly because the primordial sense of it has been somewhat lost in the West, that they tend to call love a simple exchange of different needs.

There are men and women who have taken a sabbatical year (some will stay seven years, after discovering that 'saba' in Swahili really means 'seven'), others who have a little nest egg to put to good use and it is already good if they don't eat it just like exotic fruit, others still who have arrived as tourists and find work.
For free, perhaps, but it is already a good start.
In short, here is the colourful humanity that fills the Kenyan coast from autumn to spring.
They have chosen the place of the unchanging, of the 'pole pole', and they relax so much that from being migratory they often become 'lazy'.
That is why Kenya is a certainty for them, and this year, perhaps more so than the past ones, they will stay until the war in Ukraine is over, or at least until gas comes down in price.
These are hard times and not everyone is convinced that in winter mangoes are better than melons....
Because even here it may have been better when it was worse and it was once all forest, but you will never hear that there are no longer any half seasons.
The seasons in Malindi are all full, and last just the time of two residence permits.