Nairobi

The boda-boda rider who carried me into Westlands at rush hour kept up a running commentary the whole way: which café did the better flat white, why the new expressway had killed his old shortcut, where his cousin's fintech start-up rented its desks. Somewhere in all of that he pointed out a giraffe on the horizon, as if it were a billboard. That is Nairobi in one trip across town. Five million people moving fast and talking faster, with the savannah pressed right up against the suburbs and a national park full of lions seven kilometres from the office towers.

When to go

Forget heat. At 1,795 metres Nairobi barely has a hot season: days settle around 24°C and nights drop to a jumper-worthy 13°C, so the question is rain, not temperature. The long rains arrive in April and May and can drown a morning's plans; the short rains come back in November. Come in the dry stretches instead, June to October or January and February, when the light is clean and the prop planes out of Wilson Airport are busiest for a reason. July and August are the coolest and driest, and the best window if a Maasai Mara add-on is the plan.

What it's actually like

The thing nobody warns you about is how green and how high it all is. This is not the dust-and-heat Africa of the brochure; it is a cool, hilly, coffee-growing plateau where it rains enough to keep the jacarandas purple half the year. And it runs on the phone in your pocket. You will pay a matatu fare, a bag of mangoes and your dinner with M-Pesa, the mobile-money system Safaricom launched here in 2007 while the rest of us were still queuing at cash machines. The young crowd that fills the Westlands and Kilimani rooftops after dark works in the start-ups that earned the city its Silicon Savannah tag. None of which cancels the other side: Kibera, the largest informal settlement on the continent, sits a few kilometres from gated Runda, and Nairobians will point out the gap themselves. They are rarely sentimental about their own town.

The neighbourhood you want

Base yourself in Westlands. It reaches the park and airport without a marathon commute, with the densest run of hotels, restaurants and bars. Kilimani, just south, is the nightlife address, all high-rises and lounges. For green and quiet, Karen on the south-western edge, named for Karen Blixen and built on her old coffee farm, now a museum, trades convenience for leafy plots and the Giraffe Centre on the doorstep, but you pay for it in traffic. Gigiri, around the UN headquarters, is the safest and the dullest. Wherever you land, take a ride-hailing app after dark rather than walking; Nairobi rewards a little caution, not paranoia.

Don't miss

Nairobi National Park, the only one inside a capital city anywhere on earth. For about $80 non-resident entry, through gates that open at 6am, you can watch lions, black rhino and giraffe graze against the skyline and still be back for lunch. End the morning at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the elephant orphanage on the edge of the park, open one hour a day, 11am to noon, by advance booking, a $15 to $20 donation. In that hour orphaned elephants barge in for their milk feed while a keeper tells you which one was found where. Make that lunch K'Osewe Ranalo Foods on Kimathi Street downtown, where Nairobians take the visitors they actually like: whole wet-fry tilapia or goat with ugali, mains $7 to $15, live benga most evenings. Order the fish, eat it with your hands, and let someone at the next table tell you you are doing it wrong.