Malindi City Tour, Che Shale and Marafa Hell’s Kitchen Excursion

Begin your tour of Kenya’s northern coast with pickup from your hotel or where you’re most comfortable in the early morning. Meet your driver and head north for 2.5 hours to Malindi via the Mombasa-Malindi Highway. Enjoy the beautiful scenery of plantations and diverse coastal landscapes along the way.

Once you arrive in Malindi, you will see the famous Vasco da Gama Pillar believed to be one of the oldest European monuments in Africa, built in 1498. Learn how Malindi is among Kenya’s oldest cities, strategically positioned as a sea route for traders to and from Africa’s east coast.

Continue to the distinctive Portuguese chapel known as the Chapel of St. Francis Xavier located on the waterfront.

Admire how much they have been timing for 517 years now, the walls that have defied time and still resist. Hear the story of how the chapel was also built by Vasco Da Gama in 1498 as he passed here on his way to India.

Next, head to the Malindi National Museum to peruse the exhibition of Chinese Ming carved porcelain, glass, and Persian terracotta.

After lunch, you will be guided for about 20 km (about 10 minutes) to a magical beach known as Cheshale Golden Beach in Mambrui. Enjoy your lunch while taking in views of 40 km of pristine sand dunes, making this area the most unique landscape on the coast. After lunch, you will go along the sand dunes and have the opportunity to have a photo session in an incredible setting.

We then leave again to head towards the Hell’s Kitchen. This place is located 40 km northwest of Malindi where you can admire the amazing colors of the geological depression of Marafa, called by the natives ‘Nyari’ which literally translates ‘the place that breaks by itself’, although the real name with here best known this place is ” the Hell’s Kitchen “. Just an hour’s drive from Malindi along a suggestive route through large clearings, villages and woods of accacia, you arrive in this singular and evocative place.

The Hell’s Kitchen was originally a place characterized by sandstone rock that due to the rains has eroded, over millennia, giving life to a canyon where pinnacles, spires, ravines and imposing sinuous structures (even 30 meters high) alternate creating a spectacle without equal. Walking through this kind of small canyon, whose color varies during the day according to the inclination of the sun’s rays will make you take hundreds of photos enchanting you with the typical colors of Africa.