Category: 1998

Above: Black rhino and her calf in Nairobi National Park with Nairobi city in the horizon.
Copyright Rupi Mangat

Published Nation Newspaper – Saturday magazine – 21 November 1998

The Nairobi National Park – a rare place where modern skyscrapers brush shoulders with the creatures of the wild

The uninterrupted flow of the sky, the wide open space, the grass carpet on the savannah, the unexpected thrill of seeing a wild animal – it’s all so fascinating. So it never fails to amaze me when someone remarks, “We never saw anything at the Nairobi National Park.” How on earth can anyone say that? But l guess for a lot of people the idea of a national park is a place teeming with wild animals where drama is the order of the day, where the glossy brochure lion strides majestically across the plains, where the cheetah sprints at full throttle and where eagles soar in the sky. Fed up with such stories from the array of glossy holiday brochures and coffee table books showcasing the models of the wild, it’s not hard to imagine why so many people expect to find things like they do in a shopping mall – where whatever you want to buy or see is where it always is. We are used to the expected, and so when we visit the national park, the animals must be all there for us! But national parks aren’t zoos – you don’t go from one cage to the next, where neat little signs tell you what animal you are looking at. The national park is about the unexpected – you go there as a guest to experience the grand spectacle of life. And that is what Nairobi National Park is all about. Continue reading “City Breaks” →