Easily the largest city in East Africa, Nairobi is also the youngest, the most modern and the fastest growing and the highest (1700m). "City in the sun" catches your attention at least. This is no tropical backwater.

Nairobi is one of Africa's major cities, the UN's fourth World Center, East Africa's Commercial and aid hub, and a significant capital in its own right, with a population of well over a million.

As a traveller, your first impressions are likely to depend on how, and where you arrived. Nairobi, les than a century old has claims to Western Style Sophistication. As a base for exploring Kenya, you will find it a place as any and displays enourmous vitality and buzz.

For the time you spend in Nairobi - it is a stimulating city.

Nairobi came into being in 1899, an artificial settlement created by Europeans at the Mile 327 of the East African Railway line, then being systematically forged from the coast to the interior. It was initially a supply depot, switching yard and campsite for thousands of Indian Labourers employed by the British. It's site bleak and swampy, was simply a spot where operations came to a halt while the engineers figured out their next move, mainly getting the line up the steep slopes that lay ahead. The name came from the local Maasai name for the valley, Ewaso Nairobi, "Stream of Cold Water".

Unexpectedly, the planned settlement took root. A few years later it was totally rebuilt after an outbreak of plague and the burning of the original town compound. By 1907, it was so established that the colonists took it tobe the Capital of the newly formed 'British East Africa' (BEA). Europeans encouraged by the authorities, settled in large numbers while Africans were forced into employment by tax demands or onto specially created reserves the Maasai on hte Southern Reserve and the Kikuyu to their own reserve in the highlands.

The Capital lacking any development from any established community, was somewhat characterless - and remains so. The original center retains an Asian influence in its older buildings, but today is shot through with its glassy, high rise blocks, much like those in any western city. Surrounding the commercial hub are thousands of acres of surburbs: wealthiest in the west and north, increasingly poor to the south and especially in the east where they become in part, out and out slums.

Names of these surburbs - Parklands, Lavington, Eastleigh, Shauri Moyo among others - reflect the lumble of African, Asian and European influence in the Kenyan Population, none of whom were local. The term "Nairobian" isn't in circulation because it would scarcely apply to anyone. Although it has a predominance of Kikuyu, the city is not the preserve of a single ethnic group, nor is it built on any distinct tribal land. Standing as it does at the meeting point of Maasai, Kikuyu and Kamba territories, it's choice as capital, accidental though it may have been (Kikuyu Limuru Kamba Machakos were also considered), was a fortunate one for the future of the country.