Giraffe Centre and Karen Blixen Museum Tour

The Karen-Lang'ata corner of Nairobi holds two of the city's most enduring attractions, just a few kilometres apart. The Giraffe Centre opened its gates in 1979 with a simple mission: breed the endangered Rothschild giraffe and return them to the wild. Today, you walk up a wooden ramp and suddenly you're face-to-face with a 16-foot giraffe. Your guide hands you a handful of pellets. The giraffe wraps its 18-inch blue-black tongue around your palm, gentle as a house cat. There are usually five or six giraffes on the feeding platform, and they know the drill.

Down the road, the Karen Blixen Museum occupies the farmhouse where the Danish author lived from 1914 to 1931. The rooms are preserved as she left them — her writing desk, her books, a phonograph. Outside, the gardens stretch towards the Ngong Hills, exactly as she described them. Guides here know their stuff. They will tell you about the coffee that failed, the lover who died in a plane crash, and how a penniless baroness wrote her way into literary history.

The two sites sit in Lang'ata, about twenty minutes from central Nairobi. Traffic permitting, you can do both in a half-day and still be back at your hotel by early afternoon. It is a gentle introduction to the city — no big game, no bumpy roads — but it leaves you with the sense that Nairobi holds more than meets the eye.