Until a few years ago just a village on the highway, UKUNDA is now a scruffily burgeoning town and the main service centre for the resort hotels, strung out along the Likoni-Lungalunga road, with a post office (Mon-Fri 8am-12.30pm & 2-5pm), Total petrol station, a couple of places with internet access (BTS near Casino Pub, for example), which is cheaper than at Diani Beach, branches of KCB and Postbank (both opposite Total) and hundreds of dukas. Only marginally touched by tourism, Ukunda has a life of its own, not all of it pleasant: the sprawl is an increasingly deprived area, and along with Likoni was a major centre of the ethnic violence that swept the region prior to the 1997 elections, in which some 100,000 “up-country” people were forced to flee. Still, if your holiday isn’t otherwise adventurous, it’s worth a visit to see something of Kenya a little less unreal than the strip.