Hotel
Sarova Stanley Hotel, Nairobi
Historic downtown hotel courtyard cafe centered on a thorn tree once used by travelers to pin messages for each other.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to the Sarova Stanley Hotel in Nairobi traces the thorn tree tradition that gave travelers with no telephones a way to find each other: pinned notes naming a name, a hotel, a date. It follows the hotel from four rooms above a general store in 1902 under the formidable Mayence Bent, through a fire that burned it down, to the sixty-room Stanley of 1913. The tree at today's Thorn Tree Cafe is the third planted here, put in the ground in 1997 after its predecessors withered.
This audio guide was created using AI.