Mid-October - mid-April.
This is the favorite time for vacationers of six months in Kenya, those who exploit the maximum duration of the tourist visa (3 months renewable for another 3, the modest sum of 20 €).
A great migration that has nothing to do with that of wildebeest and zebras from the savannah of Kenya to Tanzania and back. It is not a transhumance for survival, but rather a flight into a pleasure long 180 days, minutes more, minute less.
Some come back when there is the time of day and the first chestnut trees they see their leaves turn yellow, others expect the cold gloom of November.
They go, like roasted prawns on the grill, with the last charter because I've pretty much nothing all this time, we have no mica want to make a 14-hour trip.
The more daring choose Ethiopian or Turkish because they fly from Mombasa and now they have made friends with the cute Ethiopian stewards and hostesses rough Istanbul.
In Malindi and Watamu, needless to say, migratory Mzungu are almost all Italian, with a few small minority Swiss, French, German.
There is also one of San Marino, it seems, but is ashamed and do not tell anyone.
They are mostly retired people (even this one could not explain) and therefore have no specific dates or important deadlines.
The item "commitments" for them usually corresponds to the word "grandchildren."
But the tribe of svernatori also includes those recently in Italy does not feel so much at home. People who want a more simple life, less hectic, if not exactly to size of dreams, at least in tune with the thoughts less gloomy, with the general depression that lingers on the peninsula as one of those disturbances which even Bernacca could explain ' origin.
Then there are those who rents his one apartment, garage, cellar and would sell well as pain in the ass aunt for scientific experiments if he could, doing well to his calculations: "with that which costs me the heating in winter, I pay us the 'rent in a residence with swimming pool, with fines, the imu and other acronyms of the hell we pay to eat, and the rest is tip, the cleaning lady and the kid who brings me the coconuts and mangoes every morning .
Six months of relaxation, six months of condescending climate and many of the sea, iodine and beach boys.
Eh, well, you can not have only joy ... plus there's also those who have some passion to be fulfilled: jogging, reading, snorkeling, fishing, big game hunting in the night club.
And there are those who are so in withdrawal of affection, because in the West, he's lost a bit 'the primordial sense, which tends to call love a simple exchange of different needs.
There are men and women who took a sabbatical year (some will remain seven years, after discovering that "saba" in Swahili means "seven"), others who have a nest egg to be made fruitful and is already good if not if eat it just like exotic fruit, others who arrived as tourists and are to be processed.
Free, maybe, but it's already a good start.
So, here it is colorful humanity that fills Malindi from autumn to spring.
They chose the place of the immutable, the "pole pole", and relax so much that by migratory often become "pigratori".
For this to their Kenya it is a certainty, and this year, perhaps more than those of the past, already booked for next winter.
Because maybe even here it was better when it was worse and was once the whole forest, but never hear say that there are more between seasons.
The seasons in Malindi are all whole, and they last just long of a residence permit.