Textile and shoes
Textiles, although always imported, bear a particular stamp of authenticity for the reason
that they’re worn in your area making good-value, and practical, souvenirs. The printed
women’s systems -kanga-in cotton, and
heavier- weave men’s sarongs – kikoi- work great buys on coast, and older ones represent
collectable products worth searching for. Kangas will always be offered in pairs and therefore
are printed with intriguing Swahili
proverbs. Local tailors can make them into clothes for you personally at very affordable
riverside furniture
prices.
Shoes may also be great value. The common Bata chain has bargains, but you will get a lot more
interesting sandals from tourist stalls, including pretty handmade leather sandals, and also
the
much harder and much more local sandals produced from thrown away vehicle tyres
-”five-1000-mile footwear”.
Music and musical instruments
Other good buys include music Compact disks (though attempt to listen before purchasing), and
musical instruments- for instance nyati, a luo lyre- although it’s very difficult to get
quality instruments instead of souvenir
facsimiles. Drums could be bulky and many people even purchase them for tables, but look into
the skins happen to be correctly healed. Individuals made to take place one arm, more
prevalent around the coast, would be the
most practical as souvenirs. Lamu features its own wind instrument known as a siwa, an
enormous side- blown factor typically produced from an elephant tusk, but nowadays fashioned
from hardwood.
Shop comes with an excellent and incredibly reasonably listed range, including single bits of
fabric or kikois and kangas. The standard masks you will see everywhere are imported-only a
number of Kenyan tribes
make masks, the Kikuyu being the very best known, which are exceedingly rare.
Community craft centres
Nairobi has numerous craft shops with charitable status, or connected with development or
self-help projects. Although a little costly-and negotiating is not possible-they frequently
have
unusual and well-made stock, most of which finds its distance to the Christmas charitable
organisation catalogues overseas. A couple of are some distance on vacation, but really worth
making special journeys to go to, and they are
good tonics if you are struggling with curio shop fatigue.
Amani ya Juu Riverside Drive. The project utilizes fifty women who’ve been marginalized by
poverty and war. It is good for gifts-the boutique sells colourful hand crafted clothes and
bags. Matatu#48.
Mon-Fri9am-5pm
Bega Kwa Bega Korogocho projects. Federation of small handcrafts producers in the Korogocho
slums of eastern Nairobi, offering sisal bags, bracelets, batiks, furniture and cloth puppets.
Have a taxi.
Craft banda Sarit Center, Westlands. Hassle-free browsing and fair prices. Buses #25, #29, #30
and many more.
Kamili Designs Langat Rd, Karen. This textile workshop sells in your area designed, hands
printed materials. The designs are usually bold and colourful, available both through the
metre so that as cushions, bed linen,
and so on. Buses/matatus #24, #111 or #126. Mon-Fri9am-5pm.
Kazuri Beads & pottery Center Mbagathi Ridge, Karen. Kazuri, meaning “small beautiful”,
utilizes nearly 100 formerly destitute women, who make an remarkable number of hand crafted,
mostly ceramic, jewelry and beads. You can view the entire process from shaping and colouring
to firing, and gleam pottery showroom. It’s costly, however the stuff is lovely. They likewise
have
retail outdoors at Village Market in Gigiri and also the Junction Shopping Center, Ngong Rd.
buses/matatus #24, #111 or #126. Training courses Mon-Comes to an end 8am-4.30pm, Sitting
8am-1pm shop Mon-Sitting 8am-5pm, Sun
9am-5pm.
Kitengela Glass from the Magadi road, south of Nairiobi National Park. Inspiring community of
glass-blowers and crafts-folks a photogenic creative village. Site visitors are welcome and
you will observe,
browse and purchase unhassled. You will need your personal transport to obtain here. It can
make for any good extra visit if you are in the Giraffe Center or going to Daphne Sheldrick’s
elephant orphans.
Maridad Materials City Stadium roundabout, Landhies/Jogoo Rd, 2km east from the stop.
Chapel-based Maridadi was produced in 1966 being an earnings-producing community work for
women in a single of
Nairobi’s earliest slum areas-Pumwani and Shauri Moyo. The primary workshop is really a
delight if you are into making your personal clothes. A sizable screen-printing workshop (on
view in the visitors’ gallery)
produces the number of prints available within the shop. Especially appealing would be the
bark cloth prints African peoples before the finish from the nineteenth century. Buses #46 or
#34. Mon-Comes to an end 8am-5pm
Mikono Craft Shop Opposite Ratna Fitness Studio, Gitanga Rd, Kawangware, just north of
Dagoretti Corner. The opening from the Jesuit Refugee Service, with well- made work
(especially beautiful patchwork
textiles) from refugees, and superb Mozambican designs and carvings. Bus #46 or #46B.
Spinner’s Web second floor, Viking House, Waiyaki Way, Westlands. A sizable shop selling lots
of nutrients-crafts, textiles, woollen goods and jewelry, a lot of it produced by self-help
groups and people,
including Meru’s Makena Textile Workshop. Bus/matatu-any to Westlands.
Undugu upstairs in the Mall Westlands. Using its roots within the chapel, Undugu
(“fraternity”)os probably the most energetic society available in the united states and
organizes regular led visits for their slum projects.
The store sells a great choice of well-listed, high-quality crafts with more unusual products,
for example Ethiopian jewelry, basketwork, and crafts from DRC, Tanzania and Uganda. You might
have the ability to
have alook round the training courses. Bus/matatu- any to Westlands. Mon-Fri9am-6pm, Sitting
9am-55.30pm.
Utamaduni Crafts Center Bogoni East Rd, Langata. 18 individual craft shops in a single large
house, opined by Richard Leakey in 1991 (a area of the profits visit the Kenya Wildlife
Service). It’s
everything you may want, a lot of it made on-site or from street-kid projects quality and
process are high. The attached Verandah restaurant is great. Bus/matatu #24. Daily 9.30am-6pm.
Woodley Weavers Chaka Rd, Hurlingham. Recognized to many because the “rug gallery”, this place
has a number of area rugs produced by local women, frequently single moms in the Kibera slum,
using local made of woll, cotton
and plant dyes. Any bus or matatus to Ngong Rd.
Maasai and crafts marketplaces
If you are after Maasai Crafts (whether traditional handmade jewelry or products composed for
that tourist industry), or designs and carvings and crafts generally, the different “Maasai
Marketplaces” are suggested, though they
are no more a budget, hot tip they were in the past. Started downtown opposite the publish
office within the mid- 1990′s, the audience of Maasai along with other women from rural areas,
in addition to a quantity of males, were
moved several occasions by city council askaris and today convene to show their wares at
various places through the week: on Friday in the roof carpark at Village Market, Gigiri on
Tuesday at
Westgate Mall in Westlands on Saturday or sunday in the Law Courts carpark off City Hall Way
as well as on Sunday in the Yaya Center in Hurlingam. They often start around 9am and finished
mid-mid-day.
You’ll sometimes find prices well below individuals within the tourist marketplaces, with good
usually you will need to bargain challenging what appears as an acceptable cost. The Saturday
Law Courts marketplace is
most likely probably the most promising from the three for any bargain.
The Embakasi Village Crafts Market, situated around the Mombasa road in order to the airport
terminal (second activating the left soon after City Cabanas Restaurant bus #34 and #34B), is
possibly among the
most organized in Kenya, and many products tend to be less expensive than in other Nairobi
marketplaces. There’s a place where one can watch the carvers happening, and commission
individual carvers.
Kariokor market
Between Rececource Road and Ring Road, Kariorkor Market Road and Ring Road, Kariokor Market
S(named following the despised war time”Company Corps” bus/matatu #4, #6, #14, #15, #30, #31,
#32, #42, or
#46/46B) is nearer to an oriental bazaar than most marketplaces in Kenya, with permanent
cubicles for that traders. Inside, there’s just as much manufacturing finishing happening as
selling- you will find sisal weavers,
leather employees, makers of tyre-rubber sandals (“5000-mile, footwear”, it remarkably
comfortable ) craftsmen, toy-makers, tailors, hair stylists, along with a row of excellent,
inexpensive, amazingly clean eating
places, popular at lunchtime with local employees. Note that you might be mobbed by kids and
touts here.
Kariokor is the greatest devote Nairobi to purchase baskets (vyondo), created using sisal,
coloured with natural or artificial dyes with garish plastic or with cord made of the bark
from the baobab
tree. The cord baskets could be truly exquisite, with small beads use in the tight weave.
Numerous cubicles sell vaguely pharmaceutical oddities- snuff, remedies, charms, amulets and
so forth -where
you may also get everything from down to snakeskin. Outdoors you will find the odd African
literary jewel within the secondhand bookstalls. Clothes, footwear, toys and music
The biggest general market in Narobi is Gikomba Market, off landhies Road, beyond the Country
Bus station (to obtain there by trains and buses, take any bus or matatu for Jogoo Road and
obtain off at Gikomba).
This can be a place that couple of vacationers ever see, a labyrinth of muddy alleyways,
courtyards, and open sewers, it is also a location to see an exciting slice of Nairobi
existence, and nearly anything could be
available on purchase, from soccer practice uniforms and electronics to industrial-size ovens.
You will find also tailors, she repair shops, hair stylists and various little bars and food
stalls. Include someone
you never know the area, though it is easy to obtain lost and Gikomba could be unsafe.
For everyday general merchandise stores, in the CBD, the eastern area of the City Market
district is easily the most useful area. Biashara street (biashara means commerce) when the
street for materials
and a good option to purchase tents and mospuito nets. For affordable and never-so -cheap
imports, the hangar-like Freemark Pavilion in south Uhuru Park has 100s of stalls.
You will find clothes shops throughout, with fashion shops on Standard and Kaunda roads, and
much more lower-to-earth gear on Kenyatta Avenue, Moi Avenue and Kimathi Street. Good-value
shoes is
offered by the African Boot Co, on Moi Avenue opposite Bookpoint, and Bata, that has numerous
branches round the city. Even cheaper shoes are available at Miniprice Shoes Supermarket
on River road.
If you want to purchase toys, you’ll get the best products are in your area made
wire-and-fabric gadgets- cars, bicycles, flapping wild birds- that are sometimes usually made
in your own home for sons and nephews and
not available. The very best general toyshop within the CBD is Hobby Center in Jubilee
Insurance House on Kaunda Street, but Village Market also offers a great toyshop, Toy World.
The large amount of music on Compact disc- whether legitimate, murky, or illegal -makes
Nairobi an excellent spot for music fans, particularly if you possess a taste for Kenya’s
stunning number of ethnic musical
strands, as well as all the different tracks from elsewhere in east and central Africa,
especially Congo. Try Assanand’s and Musikland on Moi Avenue, Melodica on TomMboya Street or,
better
still, the host of shops and stalls on and around River Road and Accra Road.
Departmental stores
Nairobi presently has the dubious distinction of getting more departmental stores- a lot more
than twenty and counting-than every other African city outdoors Nigeria, supplying an
inconvenience-free atmosphere to get
up with regular shopping and business. You will find many of them stuffed in to the western
and northern and surrounding suburbs where they focus on the expat and wealthy Kenyan
marketplaces. All of them include banks, travel
agents, specialist food providers and a variety of cafés and restaurants.
Junction Dagoretti Corner, Ngong Rd. also called Nakumatt Junction, it includes a sizable
Nakumatt supermarket, cinema, book shop, greengrocer, restaurants, a great boutique selling
leather
items, the Kitengela glass shop and fashion stores.
The Mall Westlands. Shops and offices together with a branch of let us Go Travel, a sports
shop, a French bakery, ice- cream parlour,a 711-style convenience store and various fashion
and clothing store.
Buses #25, #29, #30 and many more.
Prestige Plazza Ngong Rd. Includes a large supermarket, cafe and completely new cinema showing
the most recent Hollywood blockbusters.
Sarit Center Westlands. A large, established complex, using more than 60 shops and offices,
together with a dry-cleaner, any adverse health- food store, a wrist watch repairer, a publish
office, a multiplex complex cinema, an
Uchumi Hypermarket, the Arena Fitness center, a sizable branch from the Text book center as
well as an Apple computer store. You will find good quality sports and hobbies merchants
around the lower first floor. Buses as
for that Mall.
Village Market Limuru Rd, Gigiri. Upmarket shopping center that’s more California then
Nairobi, filled with miniature waterfall. A lot more than 100 shops complete for the custom
like a four-screen
discount riverside furniture
cinema, a Nakumatt hypermarket, a bowling alley and a very good food court with great German,
Thai and African shops, bus/matatu #106 and #108.
Westgate Westlands. The latest and probably the most impressive malls in Nairobi- a huge
Singapore-style space, housing an enormous Nakumatt supermarket, a great Safaricom service
center, high-finish
clothing boutiques, a cinema along with a good book shop.
Yaya Center Argwings Kodhek Rd, Hurligham. There is a good deli here, a helpful newsagent with
awide choice of mainly British magazines, a bookshop, supermarket, health- food store. French
bakery,
publish office, chemist, camping supply store along with a good toyshop. Bus/matatu #41, #46or
46B.
Safari transport and operators
Nairobi may be the travel hub of Africa, with scores of possibilities for safaris around Kenya
and literally 100s of safari operators, vehicle-rental shops and travel specialists to offer
you all you
requirement for your vacation. If you are are organizing yourself drive safari in Kenya
(without or with a person),
One possibility not frequently considered is cycling: Hell’s Gate at Naivasha Kakamega Forest
and many other small parks allow bikes, and there’s lots of wonderful cycling country besides
these
areas. For bicycle rental contact Bike Treks, though observe that they like you to definitely
cycle on vacation as there is a chance of thievery in Nairobi.
In the other finish from the budget spectrum, the possibilities for photography to see the
nation are without equal should you charter an airplane. A couple of small operators, mostly
based at Wilson Airport terminal,
will oblige “see Air charter companies”