Nairobi: The Safari City That Keeps Surprising Me
I have a confession to make about Nairobi. When I first started planning Kenya trips, I treated the city as a transit node - somewhere you fly into and fly out of as efficiently as possible before you got to the actual Kenya. I was wrong about this, across multiple visits, until eventually I had to accept that Nairobi is not an obstacle to Kenya. It is part of Kenya, and a genuinely extraordinary part at that.
Nairobi National Park is the unavoidable first stop, and it remains one of the more surreal wildlife experiences available anywhere. The park covers 117 square kilometres directly adjacent to the southern edge of the city. Kenya Wildlife Service manages it as both a wildlife sanctuary and a vital wildlife corridor. I stood at a small rise on my first morning and watched a pair of lions walking through golden grass while, perhaps three kilometres behind them, the glass towers of Upperhill glittered in the early sun.
The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust runs a public visiting hour each morning at its elephant nursery, where orphaned calves are rescued and raised before reintroduction to wild populations. Watching a six-month-old elephant figure out how to use its trunk with its keeper's patient guidance is an experience that wrecks even the most resolutely un-sentimental visitor. I was not resolutely un-sentimental. I was comprehensively wrecked.
The Karen Blixen Museum, in the suburb that bears her name south of the city centre, tells the story of the Danish author who farmed coffee on the Ngong Hills in the early twentieth century and wrote about it in Out of Africa. The view from the garden - the Ngong Hills in the middle distance - is still recognisable from the book's descriptions despite a century of development.
The city's restaurant scene has expanded dramatically and is now, by any serious measure, one of the best in Africa. I ate at an Ethiopian restaurant in Westlands that had a queue out the door on a Tuesday night. I had Kenyan fusion food at a rooftop restaurant in Kilimani where the chef was working with Maasai herbs and Lamu spices in combinations I had not encountered before.
The Maasai Market, which rotates between various city venues through the week, is one of the best craft markets in East Africa - a dense, energetic gathering of vendors selling beadwork, wood carvings, and Kitenge fabric. Nairobi is also Africa's tech startup capital, often called Silicon Savannah, and the energy of a young, ambitious, creative city is palpable in almost every neighbourhood.
Nairobi is not a replacement for the parks and the coast. But it is not a waiting room for them either. Give it time. Let it surprise you.
