24 HOURS IN NAIROBI
NAIROBI, KENYA— If you’re going on safari in Kenya, chances are you’ll have some time to kill in Nairobi.
With more than three million people, Kenya’s capital is the kind of wild bustling place where skyscrapers tickle the clouds above gated communities and sprawling slums, as traffic clogs streets while wild baboons from the adjacent Nairobi National Park tear through curbside garbage. “Don’t be surprised if you see lions on the side of the road,” Suzanne Mutile of the Kenya Tourism Board tells me as we inch our way through chaotic traffic. “It’s survival of the fittest. This is Africa!”
This is where Mutile took me during my short stay in the city:
The giraffe centre
A short drive from the city centre, the Giraffe Centre was established in 1979, to breed and protect the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe: one of nine giraffe sub-species. Visitors can hand feed these long-necked ungulates treats from a platform. Place a treat between your lips and you can get a lick from a slimy 45-centimetre long tongue! The property’s Giraffe Manor hotel allows you to feed them from the comfort of your room.
Elephant orphanage
Open since 1977, the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s elephant orphanage is home to more than two dozen young animals. Orphaned primarily by poachers after their parents’ tusks, baby elephants are brought here, often malnourished and traumatized, to be nursed to health before being released back into the wild at the age of about three. Open to visitors daily from 11 a.m. to noon.
Karen Blixen Museum
Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914. Writing under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, the Danish author would go on to pen numerous books during her lifetime, the most famous of which was her second: 1937’s Out of Africa. Played by Meryl Streep in the 1985 film of the same name, the writer’s legacy lives on at this museum, which occupies the house Blixen lived in while in Kenya.
Galleria Shopping Mall
Whether you’re after a pair of leather safari boots, hokey souvenir T-shirts, blaring Kenyan pop CDs, vibrant paintings by local artists, a case of Tusker Beer, wood carvings of big game, bright Maasai shuka robes or colourful dashiki shirts, Galleria Shopping Mall has it all. Don’t be surprised if you have to pass armed guards and airport-style security to get in. The mall is open daily.
The Carnivore
At Carnivore, meat is king. Waiters come to your table with hulking spits and steaming platters that can include pork, beef, chicken and lamb, as well as more exotic meats, such as ostrich, crocodile and ox testicles. Icy bottles of Tusker Beer are plentiful and so is dawa, the Swahili word for “medicine:” a cocktail made from vodka, honey, lime juice and sparkling water.