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Malindi, Kenya (AP) -- When Joan Rutherfoord Goodhart first came to Malindi on vacation in 1943, the floor of the Holmes Hotel was made of packed-down earth.
Half a century later, Malindi boasts dozens of comfortable, intimate hotels with thatched roofs, airy rooms and luxurious vegetation. Game fish are plentiful, and the millions of brightly colored fish that dart in and out of a long coral reef make the area a snorkelling and scuba diving paradise.
But most of the rooms stand empty, and boats to the reef are idle.
The steady decline in the number of tourists to Malindi and Kenya's entire Indian Ocean coast since 1990, capped by this season's precipitous drop, is a tale of complacency, government mismanagement, corruption -- and sometimes, an unfamiliarity with Kenyan geography.
"It never was a smart sort of place," says...