Hells Kitchen
If you fancy a bit of an expedition into the back of beyond, this can provide a most interesting morning out. We mean “morning”, because during the heat of the day this place lives up to its name!
It is quite a trip – between 1½ and 2 hours, depending on the road. You will be rewarded by views of a miniature grand canyon with spectacular rock towers and cliff faces.
It is well worth hiring one of the local guides to take you down to the bottom and do a bit of exploring. Take a bottle of water with you and take care – the way down can be tricky. The bottom of the “canyon” is littered with iron nodules, which give a clue as to how the rock formations – really just an eroded hillside – came to be created.
Archaeologists have recently discovered evidence of primitive iron smelting by the Sabaki River, not too far distant. It is not hard to imagine early man collecting these nodules, scraping holes in the hillside to get at more of them, ever deeper, then erosion taking place during the rainy season and the caves collapsing. Hard upper layers, softer lower layers overlaying the iron stratum, heavy rain every year and “Bingo” – we have our own Grand Canyon.
