City of trees

Why did nobody tell me this about Nairobi? (2 minute preview, 5 minute full article)

Even with my eyes closed, I’d know I was far from home. It’s the birds. I can hear them calling constantly, and I recognise none of them. One gives a loud ‘pew, pew, pew’, another a distant monotone, over and over, another a repetitive ‘whoee, whoee’. Some have more musical, complex songs which I couldn’t begin to describe. At a guess, I’d say I’ve heard ten or more different types of bird call.

I’m in the Karura Forest, a thousand peaceful hectares just minutes from central Nairobi. It’s crisscrossed with dozens of tracks, but on a weekday it’s fairly quiet. Apart from my guide, Moses, I’ve seen approximately twenty people, most of them women walking or running on their own. Much of what I’ve read and heard about Nairobi left me nervous about what I might encounter, so it’s not what I expected to see. I’m glad to have the chance to see this gentler side to the city.

I’ve heard of Nairobi as the commercial capital for not only Kenya but also for all of East Africa. I’ve heard of Nairobi as a gateway for going on safari. I’ve been warned about Nairobi as city full of crazy traffic and crime. I’ve never heard of Nairobi as a city of trees. It’s clear, however, that trees are as much a part of Nairobi’s character as traffic congestion.

image credit: Melanie Newfield

Lining the streets there’s a dazzling array, many with colourful flowers. Most prominent is the jacaranda, with its showy purple flowers. Moses tells me that if I were to visit the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, a popular place to go and view Nairobi from above, I would see a city of purple. There are a few other trees I recognise, and names pop into my head as I see them. There’s one with butter-yellow flowers, ominously named “be-still tree” in the Pacific, because it is deadly poisonous. There are flamboyant trees with feathery leaves, although sadly it’s not the season when they smother themselves in red blooms. There are many eucalypts, which delight me even though I know that their thirsty roots are bad for the local environment. Exuberant pink bouganvilleas scramble up many of the trees.

Like the trees on Nairobi’s streets, many of the trees in the Karura Forest are not native. I spot at least six species of eucalypt – although I don’t know their names, I can tell simply from the bark that they are different. There’s an area of hoop pine, a Queensland native not related to pines but a cousin to New Zealand’s kauri. There are kapok trees, tall trees native to central America which produce a fluffy white fibre around their seeds.

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