The Sarova Stanley Hotel

After feeding the giraffes, I had a cup of Kenyan coffee in their cafe and looked up directions to my planned next stop -- The Bomas of Kenya -- a cultural centre of tribal villages, dance show and ethnic restaurant and was surprised to learned it closed two weeks ago for a two-month long renovation. Darn! So I called an Uber to take me back home to figure my next step As we got to downtown, the driver was fretting a bit about if the traffic police would be present in my street. Apparently, there is a bylaw against dropping off passengers in the streets except in designated drop-off zones. What happens is that in the few seconds the door is unlocked while dropping or loading passengers, a cop jumps in and extorts a bribe! As the big hotels have space for the act, I suggested he drop me at the Stanley, which I knew was not far.

So, here I am at the top hotel in town at 1:30, and decided to have a leisurely main meal of the day at the legendary Thorntree Cafe. This is a place with a legend. In the 1950s, a small café in the then Stanley Hotel became a hang-out for expats and bohemians as well as a central meeting place in Nairobi. People and travelers met here to swap information, trade stories, bum rides or figure out how to navigate the wilds of Kenya.

When it was “just a small cafe” in the then Stanley Hotel, it played host to several famous folks like Elspeth Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.. It is said that Ernest Hemingway coined the term “safari” whilst seated at this cafe. In 1958, when the hotel was redesigned, a Naivasha thorn tree (Acacia xanthophloea) was planted in its courtyard with the intent of providing a little shade for the tables here. Things didn’t turn out as planned because travelers used the tree-trunk to post notes and bulletins and turned a tree into a post office, leaving messages for travelers. The hotel now has a bulletin board to stick messages to.

Anyway, a nice dinner, then spent the rest of the day resting.Read more