Kenya 7 Day Itinerary: Nairobi, Naivasha and a Masai Mara Safari

About 15 dollars, 1 hour, open until 5pm. It is the first plan after check-in: it is in Langata, in the southwest of the city near the Karen hotels, and needs no booking.

The centre was founded in 1979 to save the Rothschild giraffe, which was down to little more than a hundred animals in western Kenya. From the raised platform you hand feed pellets with the giraffe’s head level with yours, and its long, dark blue tongue is the part nobody forgets.

About 18 dollars, paid through the government platform, 75 minutes, open until 6pm. It is 10 minutes by car from the Giraffe Centre, and the whole district, Karen, is named after her.

The Danish writer lived here from 1917 to 1931, trying to grow coffee at an altitude too high for coffee. The book she later wrote, Out of Africa, became the 1985 film. The house keeps her furniture and props from the shoot, and the farm machinery still stands in the garden.

80 dollars per adult plus the platform fee; 4 hours by car with a driver. Go in at 6am when it opens: that is when the lions are still active and the city traffic has not started.

It is the only national park in the world on the edge of a capital, and the photo everyone wants is this one: a zebra or giraffe in front and Nairobi’s skyscrapers on the horizon. But it is a real safari, with lions, buffalo and one of the country’s best protected black rhino populations. It is a rehearsal for the Masai Mara on Day 4.

Just one hour, from 11am to noon, every day, and only with advance booking on the official website. It is on the western edge of the park, so it fits straight after the morning safari.

Founded in 1977 by Daphne Sheldrick, the nursery rescues calves whose mothers died from poaching or drought and raises them until they can return to the wild, years later, in Tsavo. During the visit the keepers bring the calves out for their bottles and mud bath and tell each one’s story by name.

Free tour, 45 minutes, 3 kilometres from the Karen Blixen Museum. It is a calm late afternoon after a day that started at 6am.

The workshop started in 1975 with two women and now employs hundreds, almost all single mothers. The tour goes through every stage: clay shaped by hand, the kiln and the painting of each bead. The shop at the end sells the pieces straight from their makers, and it is the best spent souvenir money of the trip.

20 minutes, 2 kilometres from Elsa Gate, the park’s main entrance. From Nairobi it is about 2 hours by road down the Rift Valley escarpment, with a viewpoint on the way.

It is what remains of a volcano’s vent, 25 metres of hardened lava that held out when everything around it eroded. The name honours the German explorer Gustav Fischer, who passed through in 1883. Rock hyraxes, small animals that look like marmots, sunbathe on the stones.

50 dollars per adult, 3 hours. Rent a bike at Elsa Gate and ride the 7 kilometres of dirt road to the gorge. It is one of the few parks in Kenya where you move outside a vehicle, because there are almost no predators.

Along the way zebras, giraffes, buffalo and gazelles pass a few metres from the bike. At the end, the descent into the Lower Gorge, a narrow canyon of volcanic rock with hot water seeping from the walls, is only done with a park guide: the water rises fast when it rains in the hills.

Next to the park is the Olkaria geothermal spa, with pools heated by the neighbouring power plant, good for ending the day if there is time left.

2 hours including the boat, with the boat and the walk paid separately at the jetty. Go at 7:30am: the hippos are still out of the water and you need to leave at 9:30 for the Masai Mara.

The boat crosses the lake past pods of hippos and fish eagles and lands on a crescent shaped peninsula. With no predators there, you walk with a guide a few metres from giraffes, zebras, wildebeest and waterbuck. Part of Out of Africa was filmed here.

200 dollars per adult per 24 hours from July to December, 100 dollars from January to June. From Naivasha it is about 5 hours by road via Narok to Sekenani Gate: arrive for lunch at camp and head out on the first game drive at 4pm.

The Mara is the Kenyan half of the Serengeti ecosystem, and its density of lions, leopards and cheetahs is among the highest in Africa. The low late afternoon light is the best time for the cats, which start moving once the heat eases. Camps sit inside or on the edge of the reserve, and the safari is always with a driver guide in an open roof vehicle.

450 to 500 dollars per person, 1 hour in the air plus breakfast in the bush. It is the biggest optional expense of the trip, and the only one that has to be booked weeks ahead in high season. A vehicle picks you up at camp around 5:30am.

The balloons launch from the Musiara area in the north of the reserve, near the Mara River, and rise with the sun. From above, the herds of wildebeest and zebra become patterns on the ground, and you can watch elephants and giraffes crossing the plain. The landing ends with a champagne breakfast in the middle of the savanna, and the drive back counts as a game drive.

A full day of safari, with a picnic lunch packed at camp. In migration season, July to October, the driver heads straight for the crossing points and you wait: the herd can take hours to decide whether to jump, or not.

When it does, it is the spectacle that put the Mara on the map: thousands of wildebeest and zebras plunging down the bank and crossing the current among crocodiles. Out of season, the river is still worth it for the number of hippos and crocodiles, and the day is completed with the cats on the plains.

Paid entry, 90 minutes. The flight from the Mara lands at Wilson Airport around 11am, and the museum is 20 minutes away, on the way to the north of the city.

The human origins hall is the reason to visit: Kenya is one of the cradles of our species, and the fossil casts from the Lake Turkana basin tell that story without needing a guide. The bird and mammal halls help put names to what you saw on safari, and the Snake Park is next door on the same ticket.

Entry fee paid at the gate, 2 hours, 15 minutes by car from the museum. After days inside a safari vehicle, it is the walk your body is asking for.

It is about a thousand hectares of forest inside the city, with trails, a waterfall and the caves where Mau Mau fighters hid during the struggle against British rule. The forest only exists because, in 1998, Wangari Maathai led the protests against it being carved up for development; she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Paid entry, 75 minutes, open from 8am, next to the central station. It is the last morning’s plan, close to downtown and on the way to the airport.

Nairobi was born in 1899 as a depot on the Uganda Railway, the line the British built from Mombasa to Lake Victoria and that the press of the time nicknamed the Lunatic Express, for its cost and its deaths. The museum has steam locomotives in the yard and the carriage from which a Tsavo lion dragged off a superintendent in 1900.

Paid entry at the front desk, 45 minutes, 600 metres from the Railway Museum. It is the farewell to Nairobi before the airport, 40 minutes away.

Opened in 1973, the 28 storey tower was East Africa’s tallest building for years, and the amphitheatre beside it imitates a traditional hut. From the helipad on top you see the whole city and, on a clear day, Nairobi National Park, where the trip began.