Kenya: Africa's variety show

While Kenya offers plenty of cultural diversity, the principal attraction for the majority of visitors to Kenya is its exotic wildlife and the almost unbelievable variety of its physical geography. It is hard not to think of Kenya more in terms of a continent than a country. Where else can you find palm-fringed beaches, coral reefs, abundant wildlife, alkaline and freshwater lakes, deserts, rain forest, mountains and miles and miles of acacia savannah? Tanzania comes close, but even that country can't boast the stark desert beauty of Kenya's far north, nor does Kilimanjaro possess the charm and interest of Mount Kenya.

And this is another of Kenya's major selling points: it wins out not only in terms of the quantity of experiences available but also in quality. Whether one is talking about the physical grandeur of its features or the opulence with which one can see them, Kenya delivers. While it remains a country which can be seen at leisure on a low budget, it also offers the wealthy many opportunities to part with their cash in novel ways - like helicoptering over Mount Kenya to an exclusive US$500 per person per night retreat overlooking a seemingly endless and empty African panorama.

More modestly there is a plethora of highly professional companies offering the kind of eco-tourism experience - mobile tented camps, personal guides and walking in the bush - which some people think you have to go south for.

And they've been doing it for years. While Zimbabwe and Namibia were embroiled in wars of independence and South Africa was an international pariah, while Tanzania was experimenting with socialist deprivation and Uganda was tearing itself apart, Kenya was receiving and satisfying tourists. Maybe that's part of Kenya's problem. It pretty much invented the safari and was the first sub-Saharan country to become a popular mass tourist destination. Now these other destinations are available, Kenya is seen as pass - often by people who have not even visited it - a mentality unfortunately abetted by its failure to market itself imaginatively against its southern competitors.

Marketing Kenya should be an easy job. Of course, there's always bad news - that's what news editors like best - but show me a country devoid of violence, mismanagement and sleaze. Certainly not England, Germany, France and the United States, from where Kenya draws most of its foreign custom.

So what can you do in Kenya? As already indicated, there's little that you cannot see or do. In many countries there's a fairly well-set itinerary encompassing the country's main attractions; everybody goes to the same places, often in the same order. Kenya is not like that. First you have to think what it is you'd like to do. Scuba diving off a coral reef? Technical mountaineering? Camel trekking? Wildlife viewing?

Then you've got to decide where you want to do it. There's always a choice.

Let's take a whistle-stop tour of some of the country's highlights. Leaving Lamu, we head south to Watamu. Here we can dine on fine seafood after a day spent basking in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean and watching nature's aquarium display its splendours among the corals of Watamu Marine National Park. This is one of a string of protected marine areas stretching from Kenya's border with Somalia in the north to Tanzania in the south. Alternatively we can take a boat among the mangroves of Mida Creek or a walk in Arabuko Sokoke, one of Kenya's finest indigenous coastal forests. This is home to a wide range of mammals from elephants to the elephant shrew and a spectacular population of butterflies and birds - many endemic to the area.

It is tempting to just stay here and relax - which many do - but we must move on. Leaving Watamu, we cut inland to Tsavo East National Park. Immediately we see classic images of Africa: baobabs give way to doum palms and acacias, and the bush, its flatness broken only by the occasional kopje, stretching into the distance. This is elephant country. From an estimated 40,000 elephants in the 1960s, Tsavo's elephant population dropped to as low as 5,000 before the 1989 CITES' ban on trade in ivory effectively stopped the poachers' slaughter, leaving Tsavo's elephant population to recover slowly.

Heading west and south we come to Tsavo West. Watered by the Tsavo river, which flows from the slopes of Kilimanjaro, Tsavo West has a much more rugged countenance. Everywhere you look there are towering hills topped by dripping cloud forest - hard to imagine from the hot plains below.

In the distance Kilimanjaro provides a photogenic backdrop to the most famous elephants in the world, those of Amboseli National Park. They have now been studied continuously for 25 years and the knowledge gleaned has added immeasurably to our understanding of elephant society.

Our journey inland brings us up to the fresh highland air of Nairobi - at over 5,000 feet above sea level, a refreshing contrast to the humidity of the coastal strip and the heat of Tsavo. From here we have many choices. Perhaps we should head down into the awe-inspiring Rift Valley with its soda lakes and massed flamingoes. Continuing west, we could visit the Masai Mara, the northern tip of the vast Serengeti ecosystem and one of the world's greatest wildlife spectacles.

But my choice would be to head north. Leaving the airy moorlands of the Aberdares - like Scotland with lions - for another trip, I would head for Mount Kenya, specifically the breathtakingly beautiful Chogoria route where the deep Nithi Gorge penetrates right to the foot of the summit peaks. Here I can clear lungs and mind and look down on one of the most beautiful and varied countries I've known.

Then, time permitting, I'll continue north, dropping down from the Samburu escarpment into the dry heat of an Africa that can still feel as if it has barely changed for millennia. Here I am surrounded by isolated granite peaks whose precipitous valleys echo to the songs and laughter of people for whom my world is as much an alien dream as theirs is to me, listening to the night noises of wildlife yet to be fenced in and looking up at the naked brilliance of a billion stars undimmed by city lights. I know I am privileged to live in a land where the prehistoric and the contemporary can still exist - precariously - side by side.

British-born David Simpson has been living in Nairobi for almost four years. He is the editor of Swara, the magazine for the East African Wildlife Society.

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