Nairobi National Park, Kenya: The world's most astonishing wonderland

One minute outside one of the biggest airports in Africa and there's a herd of zebras wandering through some empty bushland just off the main road into the city. Two minutes later, there are three giraffes turning their heads this way and that, looking for all the world as if they're preparing a traffic report for their mates back in the jungle.

And within just 15 minutes of clearing customs at Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta Airport in the capital Nairobi, I'm sitting watching three lions stalk another dazzle of zebra and buffalo having a mud bath in arguably the world's most astonishing wonderland – a massive wildlife conservancy on the very fringes of the fifth biggest city on the continent.

Where else on the globe could you possibly travel for such a short time from the major international airport and view such a variety of a continent's wildlife within a bare few moments of arriving?

Nairobi is special like that, and in many other ways besides. Without leaving the confines of this city, it's possible to have a pretty much whole-of-Africa experience – big game-watching, meeting and fostering a baby orphaned elephant, having afternoon tea with an endangered Rothschild giraffe, visiting one of Africa's finest craft markets, sampling a taste of colonial days at Karen Out of Africa Blixen's old house and chatting to single local mums creating beautiful jewellery to support their families.

Oh yes, and staying at a beautiful family-run boutique game lodge at the Nairobi National Park, with each cottage and its large veranda nestled in spectacular bush, and falling asleep to the roar of a lion or the call of a lone hyena.

"This park is a very special place," says Anthony Childs who has lived in Kenya all his life and now runs The Emakoko Lodge with his wife Emily. "It's Kenya's oldest designated conservation area and was the catalyst for all national parks to follow.

"It's extraordinary in being 117 square kilometres of wilderness on the doorstep of a massively growing metropolis. We're now the only capital city in the world with over 600 species of animals and birds, and more than 500 species of plants. It's amazing that it's so close to the city, but so far in terms of its atmosphere."

As such, Kenyans are quite rightly immensely proud of the park, and work hard to keep the savannah grasslands, scrub, upland forest, rocky gorges, wetlands and streams a secure refuge and breeding ground of global significance. When the government recently announced proposals for a Chinese-built railway to be constructed over the park, it was met with howls of protest and a concerted campaign against it. With its staggering numbers of lions, leopards, rhinos, buffalos, giraffes, zebras, impalas, hartebeest, elands, Grant's gazelles, vervet monkeys, baboons, hyenas, even tortoises – everything in fact but elephants – supporters have a weighty argument.

If you can tear yourself away from the park, Nairobi has far more than its fair share of other tourist attractions, too. One of the best is the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the elephant orphanage nearby, rescuing baby elephants who've fallen down wells or lost their mothers to similar accidents or poachers around Kenya.