The best things to do in Nairobi

Kenya's flagship museum on Museum Hill packs human origins, 900-plus East African birds, Joy Adamson's paintings and a snake park into one green hilltop compound you can walk in a morning.

The 1912 farmhouse where the author of Out of Africa ran a failing coffee estate, kept with its furniture, coffee machinery and the Ngong Hills filling the western windows.

Behind an unassuming Moi Avenue facade sits the Murumbi collection: floor after floor of African art, tribal weapons, stamps and photographs that most visitors to Nairobi walk straight past.

A yard of rusting steam locomotives and the carriage in which a man-eating lion killed a railway superintendent in 1900 — the Lunatic Line's own museum, five minutes from the station.

The old Provincial Commissioner's office of 1913, once known as Hatches, Matches and Dispatches, now holds Joseph and Sheila Murumbi's astonishing pan-African art and jewellery collection.

Mary Leakey's 1937 excavation on a rocky ridge above Nakuru, where Neolithic settlements, burial mounds and Iron Age enclosures sit beside a small museum in an old farmhouse.

Kenya's national culture centre in Langata: replica homesteads from a dozen communities and a daily arena show of drumming, acrobatics and dance that no hotel floor act comes close to.

Nairobi's defining tower, opened in 1974, and the only place you can stand on a helipad 28 floors up and see the city, the Ngong Hills and the national park in one turn of the head.

A small walled garden and museum on the site of the 1998 US embassy bombing, where 218 people died — the quietest, most affecting half-hour in central Nairobi.