CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Mariakani it runs 211 km to Mariakani; allow about 4 h 25 of riding. The stops in between: Kaya Kauma, The Historic Town and Archaeological Site and back through Kaya Kauma. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Behind the beaches of Kenya's north coast, on the low red ridges inland from Kilifi, sit a string of forest patches that look like nothing much from the road. They are the kayas, once the fortified villages of the Mijikenda peoples, the nine related groups that include the Giriama, and today they are the sacred groves where elders still gather. The Kaya Giriama forest is one of them, and part of a UNESCO listing that covers several of these remnants of coastal forest. The village huts were long ago abandoned and the clearings overgrown, but the grove survives because it is protected by custom, so that cutting a tree or entering without permission is a serious matter.
Read the complete Kaya Giriama write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kaya Giriama is where the day begins. Next is Kaya Kauma.
The kayas are patches of forest scattered along the coast of Kenya, each one once the fortified village of a Mijikenda community, hidden deep in the trees for protection. The Mijikenda, nine related peoples of the coastal hinterland, later moved out of the forests, but the kayas remained sacred places, where elders held ceremonies, buried their leaders and made decisions, and where cutting trees or harming the forest was forbidden. That protection has preserved precious remnants of coastal forest, rich in rare plants and animals. In 2008, a group of them, including Kaya Kauma near Kilifi, was listed by UNESCO as the Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests.
Read the complete Kaya Kauma write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kaya Kauma comes up about 43 km into the recorded legs. Next is The Historic Town and Archaeological Site.
Gedi does not announce itself. You drive along the Kenyan coast through palms, cashew trees and roadside stalls selling mangoes, turn in under the shade of the Arabuko-Sokoke forest, and suddenly there are coral-stone walls in the trees, a mosque with an arched doorway, a palace courtyard, houses with wells and sleeping niches, all roofed with branches and leaves instead of stone. This was a Swahili town, founded around the twelfth century and flourishing in the fifteenth, when it traded with the Indian Ocean world, with Chinese porcelain and Venetian glass turning up in the digging. By the early seventeenth century the people had gone. Nobody knows exactly why, and the theories, a shift of the coast, raids, or the failure of the water, have never been settled.
Read the complete The Historic Town and Archaeological Site write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 105 km into the recorded legs you reach The Historic Town and Archaeological Site. Next is back through Kaya Kauma.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Kaya Kauma write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Kaya Kauma, late in the day. Next is Kaya Giriama.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Kaya Giriama write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Kaya Giriama. That is the ride.
Kaya Giriama → Kaya Kauma is 43 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Kaya Kauma → The Historic Town and Archaeological Site is 62 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
The Historic Town and Archaeological Site → back through Kaya Kauma is 62 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Kaya Kauma → Kaya Giriama is 43 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.