#They say this is a big rich town full#

they never push the legal age limits, they seem happy just doing what is sneered at in their countries.”Įxperts say some thrive on the social status and financial power that comes from taking much poorer, younger lovers. “Old white guys have always come for the younger girls and boys, preying on their poverty. “One type of sex tourist attracted the other,” said one manager at a shorefront bar on Mombasa’s Bamburi beach.

They go dining at fine restaurants, then dancing, and back to expensive hotel rooms overlooking the coast. Up to 3,000 more girls and boys are in full-time sex work, it said, some paid for the “most horrific and abnormal acts.”Įmerging alongside this black market trade - and obvious in the bars and on the sand once the sun goes down - are thousands of elderly white women hoping for romantic, and legal, encounters with much younger Kenyan men. children’s charity UNICEF reported late last year. These same beaches have long been notorious for attracting another type of sex tourists - those who abuse children.Īs many as 15,000 girls in four coastal districts - about a third of all 12-18 year-olds girls there - are involved in casual sex for cash, a joint study by Kenya’s government and U.N. But it’s different with something like this - it’s just unwholesome.” We are 100 percent against anything illegal, such as prostitution. “It’s about trying to make those guests feel as uncomfortable as possible. “The head of a local hoteliers’ association told me they have begun taking measures - like refusing guests who want to change from a single to a double room,” Grieves-Cook said. Grieves-Cook and many hotel managers say they are doing all they can to discourage the practice of older women picking up local boys, arguing it is far from the type of tourism they want to encourage in the east African nation. The white beaches of the Indian Ocean coast stretched before the friends as they both walked arm-in-arm with young African men, Allie resting her white haired-head on the shoulder of her companion, a six-foot-four 23-year-old from the Maasai tribe. Although condom use can only be guessed at, Julia Davidson, an academic at Nottingham University who writes on sex tourism, said that in the course of her research she had met women who shunned condoms - finding them too “businesslike” for their exotic fantasies. “But it’s certainly something we frown upon.”Īlso, the health risks are stark in a country with an AIDS prevalence of 6.9 percent. “It’s not evil,” said Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board, when asked about the practice of older rich women traveling for sex with young Kenyan men. They would do well to avoid the country’s tourism officials.

#They say this is a big rich town full#

Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex.Īllie and Bethan - who both declined to give their full names - said they planned to spend a whole month touring Kenya’s palm-fringed beaches.

They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is “just full of big young boys who like us older girls.”

To match feature KENYA-SEXTOURISM/ REUTERS/Joseph Okanga Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex. A Kenyan man walks with an unidentified tourist at the Jomo Kenyatta Public Beach in the coastal town of Mombasa November 15, 2007.