Nairobi

You can visit Daphne Sheldrick’s Elephant Orphanage which is today the most successful orphan-elephant rescue and rehabilitation program in the world and one of the pioneering conservation organisations for wildlife and habitat protection in East Africa.

The Giraffe Centre is a non-profit making organization whose main objective is to provide free conservation education for school children and the youth of Kenya. As 90% of its funds are derived from tourists' entrance fee collected, and from the sales in the gift shop and teahouse, by visiting them you are making a valuable contribution towards this education.

Nairobi National Museum has some impressive and unusual artefacts and artworks. The Great Hall of Mammals features examples of a giraffe, an elephant, a buffalo, a zebra and many others. Displayed is the skeleton of Ahmed, the most famous of the giant-tusked bull elephants of Marsabit, in the north of the country. The unique interest of the Nairobi museum also lies in the human origins exhibit, where palaeontology displays are housed.

The Karen Blixen Museum provides historical material of European settlement and cultivation in East Africa, and is associated with the life of Baroness Karen Blixen, who lived in this house from 1917 -1931. The museum also served as the setting for the film based on her well known book ‘Out of Africa,’ written under the pseudonym Isak Dinesenand.

An excellent day-trip, literally on the city’s doorstep, is Nairobi National Park, a wildlife attraction where you would expect to find suburbs.

Apart from being the safari capital of the world, Nairobi is an excellent base for Kenyan travel in general. It takes barely 2 hours to get to the great trough of the ravishingly beautiful and austere Rift Valley, and the slopes of Mount Kenya, an extinct volcano some 3.5 million years old and Africa’s second-highest mountain. To the coast, it’s as little as 6 hours by road, an overnight train journey, or an hour’s flight.