48 HOURS IN NAIROBI (but nearly much longer)

‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills...’ writes Karen Blixen in the opening of Out of Africa. Her farmhouse is still there, but now it’s in Nairobi, at the foot of an electric fence.

But I’m getting ahead of my story. So let’s start when my transport dropped me, still dusty from a leopard sighting in the Masai Mara, at my Airbnb apartment in Westlands, Nairobi. Urban Retro was a chic, self-catering apartment with a security guard and Wi-Fi. I had a phone, 48 hours to kill and not a clue where I was in one of the largest capitals in Africa – a city sometimes called ‘Nairobbery’. There