Kenyan coast

From Voi to the famous Twiga Lodge at the southern coast of Kenya, the road would lead through busy Mombasa. Driving trough this big city was something we wanted to avoid, so we checked our maps and found a route, taking us from Samburu to Kinango and Kwale and finally to the coast. On all the maps this route was marked as gravel road, but we decided to try it anyway.

From Samburu to Kinango the road was surprisingly a very good tar road with no traffic at all, what a pleasure after the main route with its many lorries, where overtaking was always stressful with a left hand driven car.

Between Kinango and Kwale, the road was gravel, or better mud, for 22km. It looked, as if they had started some roadworks, but hadn’t gotten very far. There was a dry track we could follow and it was no difficulty at all to drive here. Maybe after a heavy downpour, this road would be tough, but it was dry enough at the moment.

When you have oncoming traffic like this, it always assures us, that the route is passable. When we reached Kwale, we were back on tar and had a comfortable drive to the coast.

We visited the mangrove boardwalk in Gazi, where local women explain you the different mangrove trees and the ecosystem. The boardwalk is made out of recycled plastic bottles. They collect them, send them to Nairobi, and get the planks and poles back, which are resistant to the salt water.

Our base at the coast was the Twiga Lodge at Tiwi Beach, where we had the long white sand beach lined with palm trees nearly to ourselves. What a great place to relax!

After a couple of days at the beach, we will make our way now through Tansania to go to Malawi next. More soon!