Asante sana, Nairobi

I had only been in Kenya about 15 hours with VoX and Kenya Tourism Board when I had the glorious honour of getting totally slimed by a baby elephant.

Our group was spending our first morning in Nairobi at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust - also known as the Elephant Orphanage - watching a mini herd of not-so-tiny tots tumble around in the muck during a public presentation. Presented with the tusk of a particularly winsome little (well, not-so-little) pachyderm with criminally-long eyelashes, I’d gleefully accepted the gesture without fully knowing what it meant to do so.

Funny enough, an hour prior to my hand being smooched by a snotty snout, it had been wrapped in the sandpapery - yet equally mucoid - tongue of a giraffe named Betty at the Giraffe Centre, an educational institution seeking to rebuild giraffe populations - and encourage conservation among local school children - throughout Kenya.

Following our giraffe and elephant encounters, we headed to the Karen Blixen Museum for a dose of cultural heritage. The museum was once the site of a coffee farm owned by Danish author Karen Blixen (whom you may know as Meryl Streep from Out of Africa), and now serves as a time capsule for a piece of history.

Afterwards, we lunched at Tamambo, a restaurant adjacent to Karen Blixen Coffee Garden and Cottage and another historic building with a 1920s feel, serving up organic, free-range chickens and microgreens. It was hard to believe we were mere moments away from an enormous urban centre.

Once we had been fed and watered (and by watered, I mean ‘tusked’ by Kenya’s signature lager, Tusker Beer), we stopped by Galleria, a popular shopping mall, and found a bustling complex offering amazing prices on shoes and handmade goods being sold for a song. It wasn’t like any mall I’d ever seen; for one thing, there was a DJ mixing hip hop and rap in the main atrium.

“Malls are really trendy right now,” Suzanne Mutile, marketing officer for Kenya Tourism Board told me as we browsed amidst other mall-goers who seemed to be socializing as much as shopping. “It’s the place to be on a Saturday.”

Later on at Larder, a chic urban eatery located at the Radisson Blu south of the city centre, our group marvelled at how much we’d already seen. Perhaps even more astonishing was that our group leader, Andrew Ricketts, and Mutile told us that many travellers to Kenya typically don’t spend too much time in the country’s capital; they usually fly in, stay one night at a hotel near the airport, and head to their much-anticipated Kenyan safari the next morning.

While the city is still very much a developing destination when it comes to tourism, it currently seems to be investing a lot in its infrastructure, including the introduction of the sparkling new Radisson Blu, where our group stayed two nights. While it was built mainly for guests visiting Nairobi on business, Ricketts said developments of this kind are also meant to put the city on more safari-goers’ radars as an ideal place for unique pre- and post stays.

I’m writing this story on Saturday, May 27. By the time it’s online, we’ll have flown a Cessna into the wilds of Kenya, visited the peaks of Mount Kenya and will be on our way to the plains of Maasai Mara. Over the next few days, we’ll acquaint ourselves with the local culture and learn how sustainability and voluntourism is making its mark on this bucket-list destination with the help of various organizations, including Me to We, a charitable enterprise which encourages social engagement between travellers and developing communities.