Older white women join Kenya's sex tourists

MOMBASA, Kenya (Reuters)

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

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. (Joseph Okanga/Reuters)

"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.

We both get something we want -- where's the negative?"

Emerging 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.

"This is what is sold to tourists by tourism companies -- a kind of return to a colonial past, where white women are served, serviced, and pampered by black minions,"