Best Things to Do in Nairobi

Nairobi's magic lies in how seamlessly wild East African nature sits alongside metropolitan culture: you can watch a black rhino at sunrise, feed a towering Rothschild's giraffe before lunch, walk under indigenous forest waterfalls in the afternoon and dine in a contemporary Westlands courtyard at night.

1. Take a dawn game drive in Nairobi National Park. Enter through the KWS Main Gate at first light to track eastern black and southern white rhinos, lions, buffaloes, zebras and Masai giraffes across 117 square kilometres of savannah with the city skyline rising behind them.
2. Watch orphaned calves at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Elephant Nursery. Pre-book the late-morning public slot inside the park's KWS Central Workshop gate to see rescued baby elephants charge down from the bush for their giant milk bottles and mud wallow.
3. Hand-feed endangered Rothschild's giraffes at the Giraffe Centre. Stand eye-to-eye on a raised timber gallery in Langata as eighteen-inch blue-black giraffe tongues curl gently around grass pellets from your fingers.
4. Tour the 1912 farmhouse of the Karen Blixen Museum. Walk through the rooms, original Danish furniture and coffee-roasting machinery of the Mbogani estate at the foot of the Ngong Hills where author Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) lived from 1917 to 1931.
5. Hike to the waterfall and caves of urban Karura Forest. Escape into 1,041 hectares of protected indigenous upland forest in northern Nairobi, following well-marked red-earth trails past a 15-metre waterfall, bamboo groves and Mau Mau history caves.
6. Explore the Cradle of Humankind at the Nairobi National Museum. Inspect East Africa's world-famous hominid fossil casts (including the 1.5-million-year-old Turkana Boy), the Birds of East Africa gallery and Joy Adamson's botanical paintings.
7. Take in the 360-degree panorama from the KICC Helipad. Ride the lift to the 28th-floor open-air rooftop helipad of the terracotta cylindrical Kenyatta International Convention Centre to spot the National Park plains, Ngong Hills and Mount Kilimanjaro or Mount Kenya on crystal-clear mornings.
8. Visit Kazuri Beads and the Matbronze Wildlife Art Gallery in Karen. Watch women artisans shape and glaze hand-painted ceramic beads from Mount Kenya clay, then browse lost-wax bronze wildlife sculptures over coffee in a leafy garden.
9. Walk the raised boardwalks of the Nairobi Safari Walk. Right beside the main park headquarters, elevated timber walkways wind across three simulated Kenyan ecosystems (wetlands, savannah and forest) with hippos, bongo antelopes and pygmy hippos.
10. Feast on charcoal-grilled nyama choma and Kenyan AA coffee. Share slow-roasted goat, warm ugali and kachumbari salsa at a lively open-air grill, and taste bright single-origin Kenyan filter coffee.