This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
'God's Reign'. 'Be Humble'. 'Find the Divine'. These are just some of the messages emblazoned across the windscreens of the tuk-tuks weaving through the traffic in Diani. The road is fringed with little shops selling household necessities and the smell of salt in the air hints at the ocean beyond. For now, it remains tantalisingly out of sight, but other tuk-tuks, packed with holidaymakers, are a sure sign we're nearing the coast.
I'm tracing Kenya's Indian Ocean shoreline, following a single ribbon of tarmac from Diani to Watamu and finally out to the remote Lamu Archipelago. Diani is Kenya's best-known stretch of Indian Ocean coastline, drawing travellers with its palm-fringed sands, dramatic tides and turquoise waters — whether they're rounding off a safari in Tsavo or the Maasai Mara, or simply coming for a week by the sea. Yet just a few miles inland, another side of Diani awaits.
Hidden within these tropical lowlands are the kaya forests: sacred groves of pod mahogany, strangler fig and combretum, treasured by the coastal Mijikenda people as places of prayer and reflection. They contain the remains of long-abandoned fortified villages dating back to around the 16th century. Most are closed to visitors, but a community ecotourism project run by members of the local Digo community has opened Kaya Kinondo to travellers willing to experience it respectfully.
Before we enter, my guide Mohammed Danda hands me a midnight-blue sarong to knot around my waist and explains the rules: don't disturb the flora and fauna, and to keep our voices low. This, he tells me, is a deeply spiritual place. "It's the home of my ancestors," he says. "It's important to preserve
their peace."
Barefoot, Mohammed leads me along a leaf-strewn path, stepping over sinuous roots and jagged coral stones that hint at the former settlement beneath the trees. The canopy all but shuts out the light, and the air is rich with the scent of earth and bark. As we approach, a dissenting baboon bellows from somewhere deep inside the forest.
To the Mijikenda people, Mohammed explains, the forest is as well stocked as a pharmacy: plants here are used to treat everything from coughs to erectile dysfunction. "Like us, every tree has a spirit inside, and when one dies, it's a sign," he says, pausing beside a fallen giant. "We honour it with a ritual, then leave it to decompose, so that its surroundings may regenerate one day."
Continuing north along the coast, I find that this reverence for nature takes a different form. By the time I reach the fishing town of Watamu. Offshore, coral reefs teem with life — and for Guido Paap, master scuba diver trainer at Reefo Divers, they hold an almost spiritual significance of their own.
Kenya was the first country in Africa to establish a Marine Protected Area, and this stretch of coast now encompasses marine national parks at Kisite-Mpunguti, Mombasa, Watamu and Malindi, as well as six additional marine reserves. Years spent diving these waters have given Guido a profound respect for the reefs' fragility.
While climate-driven bleaching has taken its toll over the years, remedial work is underway. "Here, travellers can be so much more than just a diver," says Guido. "We've created a PADI Coral Reef Restoration Diver course so that visitors can learn how to harvest broken corals and plant fragments onto artificial reefs that act as nurseries. Together, they'll give this reef a second life."
The same waters that shelter Watamu's coral gardens also provide a haven for green, olive ridley and hawksbill turtles. Between April and September, females haul themselves onto the gently sloping beaches to nest, with their hatchlings emerging in the New Year.
That evening, I join a night patrol along the shore. The beach is lit only by a thin wash of moonlight and the volunteers' red-filtered torches. White light disorients the turtles, I'm told, so we move in near-darkness, our voices lowered to whispers.
Somewhere ahead, a female green turtle is already digging, her flippers throwing up small showers of sand as she works. We keep our distance and wait.
"It feels divine, watching her like this," whispers Teresiah Njeri, a volunteer for the not-for-profit Local Ocean, who has walked this beach on patrol more nights than she can count. "In the nesting season, we're out here every night, making sure each of these mothers gets the peace she needs and deserves." There's something incredibly moving about watching a creature go about an ancient ritual so precisely, entirely undisturbed.
My final stop lies to the north, in the Lamu Archipelago. Here, reverence isn't hidden in a forest canopy or moonlit sands, but carried on the call to prayer that echoes across the town five times a day.
In the old town of Lamu, residents anticipate the end of Ramadan with a quiet excitement. By day, the alleyways are hushed, shopkeepers conserving their energy through the long hours without food or water; by late afternoon, the voices of the muezzins drift out from a dozen minarets at once, unhurried and overlapping. It's as though the whole town seems to exhale. In anticipation of the evening's iftar feast, lively Islamic music gushes from loudspeakers in the main square, while market vendors sell treats such as kaimati and visheti — nuggets of buttery, cardamom-flavoured dough with a crisp, sugary coating.
Mahmoud Mahmoud, my guide, reveals that I'm standing in the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa, and that Swahili means 'of the coast' in Arabic. It was here that East Africans, Arabs, Persians and Asians first coalesced, bringing a new language and culture into being. An important trading centre from the 14th to the 19th centuries, thanks to its deep, sheltered waters, Lamu once welcomed dhows laden with spices and gold, but also carrying the shamed trades of ivory and enslaved people. Today it's Unesco World Heritage-listed for its medina-like maze of coral-rag and mangrove-wood houses, standing side-by-side along shaded alleyways.
The grandest houses have barazas (stone benches) outside, where guests are invited to sit and chat when coming to call. Their most remarkable features, however, are the elaborately carved wooden front doors and lintels, embellished with botanical motifs and verses from the Koran. While many original doors have been sold for export over the years, they've been replaced with skilfully-made replicas, which are helping to keep the art of woodcarving alive.
As we wander, we pass several sawdust-scented workshops, abuzz with activity. We step beneath the ylang-ylang tree that perfumes the courtyard of the Swahili House Museum and then into the house itself. It's a modest space, its simplicity offset by a whitewashed wall of decorative niches displaying ceramics. "Our houses keep cool, because we use natural materials such as timber, coral and lime," says Mahmoud. "Which is just as well, because in the 18th century, when this was built, the women of the household spent all their time indoors. It's different now, of course."
Mahmoud walks me south, past the fort, to where the Riyadha Mosque rises above a wide, dusty square, its roofline ringed in yellow and a single green dome catching the last of the light. It's here, he tells me, that the heart of Lamu's spiritual life can be found.
Built in 1892 by the Comorian scholar Habib Swaleh, the mosque became a centre of learning unlike anywhere else on the coast. At a time when religious education was often restricted by status and lineage, Habib Swaleh had scandalised the town's conservative establishment by bringing Islamic teachings to the descendants of enslaved people and the island's poorest families, insisting that devotion belonged to everyone, not just the well-born. His reforms still shape the town. During Maulidi, the annual celebration of the Prophet Muhammad's birth, thousands of pilgrims arrive from across East Africa and beyond, sleeping in their hundreds inside the mosque and the surrounding alleyways.
Habib Swaleh is buried just outside, in a modest tomb visited by pilgrims year-round. Mahmoud lowers his voice as we pass it, out of habit more than instruction. "People come from everywhere to sit here," he says. "Not just to pray but to be near him."
I sit on a low wall across the square as the light softens. A few minutes later the call to prayer begins, first from the Riyadha Mosque itself, then answered by minarets further off, rolling across the rooftops until the whole town seems to vibrate. Mahmoud closes his eyes, listening, and I realise that I've spent this trip seeking out the sacred. Here, however, it doesn't need to be searched for: it simply arrives on the evening air, exactly on time.
Published in the Indian Ocean Collection 2026 by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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