Nairobi, Where Most
Kenya Trips Begin
and End

Most people I talk to about Kenya picture the same thing: a safari. Land Cruisers in the Mara, lions in the long grass, sundowners on the edge of a plain. The trip I took to Kenya in April of 2024 did not involve a safari at all, and I had a wonderful time anyway.

My mother, my sister, and I flew to Nairobi as part of a larger contingent of friends and family who were gathering to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of a family friend. It was a week-long celebration. To be fair, twenty hours of travel from California for a birthday party is a lot. But Kenya was a country I had wanted to see for a long time, and going as part of a group, with my mother and sister, with events already planned for most of the days, was an unusually low-friction way to make a first trip to a place I had been quietly carrying around for years.

What I had not expected was that the trip would mostly be a city trip.

Nairobi is a city

It sounds obvious, written down. Nairobi is a city. But Kenya gets imagined, from a distance, almost entirely through the lens of its wildlife, and one of the surprises of being there was just how much of the trip turned out to be a metropolitan one.

Nairobi is vast. It can take you over an hour to cross from one side of it to the other, the way it can in any large global city. It has neighborhoods with their own personalities, and we spent the week moving between them. Westlands. Kilimani. The central business district. We shopped at bazaars and markets where the wares were vibrant and the conversations were better than the prices. We toured high-rises and were shown through penthouse apartments with views over the city. We had meals at restaurants that came with their own wine bars and cigar lounges, the kind of places that exist in every major global city when you know where to look. We heard live music, sometimes from private musicians who came and serenaded us in the evening.

The other thing nobody tells you about Nairobi is how green it is. The city is genuinely lush. Trees everywhere, even between residential blocks. You can stand on a high floor in the middle of the city and look out over what feels like a forest with rooftops in it. The skyline is real, but so is the canopy that grows up around it. Almost no large city I have visited has that ratio.

The one moment that pulled gently in the direction of the country’s wildlife reputation was a visit to the Giraffe Centre, where you can stand at eye level with Rothschild giraffes inside the city itself. Even when you are deliberately doing a city trip in Kenya, the country finds a way to put a giraffe in front of you. I appreciated that.

The rooftop at Ole Sereni

One night we went to a rooftop party at the Ole Sereni Hotel.

By the time our group arrived, the bar was already winding down for the night. The staff took one look at the size of the contingent walking in and reopened the whole place. Music came back on. The dance floor lit up under our feet, the kind of floor that pulses with the beat. We could see straight out over the park next door, the city dark and humming around us, and for the next several hours that rooftop was ours.

What I keep thinking about is who was actually on that rooftop. People had come in for this birthday from across mainland Africa. From all over the United States. A large contingent from Europe. A handful who had flown in from Asia. Everyone in motion, everyone laughing, everyone meeting people they would never have met if a man none of us had ever met had not turned fifty.

The makeup of that rooftop, I came to understand, is not unique to that party. It is the makeup of Nairobi itself. The city is one of the most important diplomatic and humanitarian hubs in the world. The United Nations has one of its four major global offices there. Embassies, NGOs, international businesses, regional headquarters for institutions you would not necessarily associate with East Africa, all of them have a presence in Nairobi, and the people who run them come from everywhere. You hear British accents constantly, a legacy of the Commonwealth years. You hear accents from across the continent, every region represented, every country with its own cadence. You hear American English, French, Mandarin, Arabic, German. Nairobi is a genuinely global city, full stop.

On being on the continent

Being on the continent at all does something. The light is different. The way the city is laid out is different. The texture of public life, the rhythm of how people greet each other, the small daily gestures, all of it sits a little closer to things I grew up around than what I usually encounter in California. Africa is not one place. It is fifty-four countries and well over a billion people, with as much internal variety as any other large region of the world. But there is a way that the continent recognizes itself across that variety, and being inside that recognition, even as a visitor from somewhere far away, is its own quiet kind of experience.

I came home wanting to see more. Not just more of Kenya. More of the continent.

What I am going back for

This November, I am going back to Kenya, this time for the trip that more typically gets marketed.

I will spend three days in Nairobi at the start, and I will visit the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the elephant orphanage outside the city. From there I will move through three more locations across the country: Sweetwaters Serena Camp at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Amboseli Serena Safari Lodge with Kilimanjaro on the horizon, and Enashipai Resort and Spa at Lake Naivasha. I am doing the trip through Wanderlust Campus, the travel school where I earned my certification, in partnership with Tembo Wild. It is, in part, a familiarization trip. I will be evaluating these properties not just as a traveler but as someone whose clients might one day want to be in those rooms, on those drives, looking out over those plains. I will write about it when I get back.

What I already know, before I have gone, is that Kenya is going to surprise me again. Not because the safari will be more than expected, although I have every reason to believe it will be. Because Kenya has already shown me, on a trip that had nothing to do with safaris, that the country is far larger than the single story most travelers know about it.

Kenya is more than just safaris

I went to Kenya for seven days and never once saw a lion. What I saw instead was a city full of trees and traffic and dance floors and accents from everywhere, a Giraffe Centre tucked inside a neighborhood, penthouse apartments and cigar lounges and bazaars and rooftop bars that reopen for you at midnight. I saw a country that was much bigger than the picture I had in my head when I got on the plane.

I am looking forward to seeing more of it in November, and to writing about whichever versions of the country reveal themselves to me next.

Priscilla Nzessi is the founder of Moments of Sonder Travel. She is returning to Kenya in November on a familiarization trip through Nairobi, Ol Pejeta, Amboseli, and Lake Naivasha.