Category: Travel
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Exploring Oloolua Forest
Last week’s article was all about the new Land Rover Defender, which I had the opportunity to test in Oloolua Forest. The dirt tracks that we used were beneath the SGR, which runs right across the southern portion of the forest. I’ve written a few articles for this column recently about Nairobi’s forests, and the…
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A Review of the New Defender
I don’t envy the designers at Land Rover. Creating the new Defender must have been one of the most challenging jobs of the automotive world. The old models have been adored across the globe for decades, for their flaws as much as their off-road capabilities. Their designs were simple, rugged and instantly recognisable. The new…
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A Night on the Sacred Mountain
‘Maape!’. ‘Let’s go!’. Our Samburu guide, Lemaiyan, urged us to continue our climb after a long water break. The mid-morning heat had been turned up a notch, and our progress was slow. We zigzagged up the eastern slope of Mount Ololokwe, along a path well trodden by elephants and cattle. Stumbling under the weight of…
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Driving Kenya’s Roads
‘I think you could well be interested in this,’ a friend said, as she handed over a book. It was the AA Members Handbook for 1982-84: ‘Guide to Motoring and Touring in Kenya’. I was certainly well interested – particularly, because it was published around the time I came back to Kenya to stay. Gavin…
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Life and Death on the Mara River
Of the 1.5 million wildebeest that trek into the Masai Mara from the Serengeti each year, an average of 300,000 die, most while crossing the Mara River. While death at such a scale may seem senseless, it plays a vital role in the nourishment of the river ecosystem for years after the dust settles.
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Exploring the Ngong Road Forest
A few years ago, a good friend of mine told me a story that has stuck with me. He was driving around town with his buddies one evening, with a chocolate cake from Java on the backseat. They hit traffic on Ngong Road, and decided to take the loop behind Jamhuri Park. It was getting…
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A Guidebook to the People’s Forest
‘It seems nothing short of miraculous, looking back, that the Karura Forest Reserve still exists, given the pressures it faced during the latter half of the 20th Century.’ This is the opening to a chapter in the Karura visitors’ guide, published in October 2019. It goes on to describe these pressures in detail – destructive…
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A Drive in the Nairobi National Park
Waking up last Saturday morning, the sun wasn’t up either. There was still a chill in the air. I pulled the duvet closer round me and began to wonder what I was going to do about Going Places. I began to wish, as I had often wished these last three lockdown months, that I could…
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A Sunday Stroll in the Ngong Hills
For years my wife has been urging me to hike the Ngong Hills with her. When she first came to Nairobi in 2013, she had read that it was one of the city’s top tourist attractions. But I was always reluctant to do it, convinced that it was unsafe by tales of hikers being ambushed…
Going Places Africa 