Nairobi National Park

This guide to Nairobi National Park centers on a monument near the main gate, where two Kenyan presidents, decades apart, each set fire to a stockpile of confiscated elephant tusks on the very same ground. It traces how wildlife scientist Richard Leakey convinced President Daniel arap Moi to make the first burn in 1989, betting that the shock would move world opinion where diplomacy had failed, and how a second president returned to the same spot years later because poaching had not stopped. Behind the monument, giraffes and zebras graze against Nairobi's skyline, the only skyscrapers on earth sharing a horizon with wild lions. Stand at the monument itself, on the actual ash, before looking out over the grassland.