Sarova Stanley Hotel, Nairobi

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.