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.
A 354 km round trip from Gazi - roughly 6 h 38 in the saddle. It goes by way of Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests, The Historic Town and Archaeological Site and back through Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
The beaches of Diani are famous for white sand and turquoise water, and a short walk inland a forest that is older than the hotels keeps its own rules. Kaya Kinondo is the last sizeable fragment of the coastal forest that once covered the southern coast of Kenya, and for the Digo people it is a sacred grove, the place where their ancestors settled and where the elders still perform ceremonies. It is one of the Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests, inscribed in 2008, and it differs from some of the others in having a well-organised community programme, run by the Digo elders, which lets visitors in with a guide.
Read the complete Kaya Kinondo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kaya Kinondo is where the day begins. Next is Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests.
Along the Kenyan coast, behind the resort hotels and the palm-lined beaches, there are scraps of forest that matter more to local people than almost any building. These are the kaya, the sacred forests of the Mijikenda, a group of nine related peoples including the Giriama and Digo, who say their ancestors settled in fortified villages hidden in the woods. Each kaya was a clearing in the trees, with a ring of defence and a set of elders who held the village's laws and ceremonies, and when the villages were abandoned, the forests were kept as places of prayer and burial.
Read the complete Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests comes up about 77 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 176 km into the recorded legs you reach The Historic Town and Archaeological Site. Next is back through Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests, late in the day. Next is Kaya Kinondo.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Kaya Kinondo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Kaya Kinondo. That is the ride.
Kaya Kinondo → Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests is 77 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests → The Historic Town and Archaeological Site is 99 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
The Historic Town and Archaeological Site → back through Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests is 106 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests → Kaya Kinondo is 72 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.