There are 29 days of AFCON and your team plays three: what to do with the rest

The group stage of AFCON 2027 is three matches over about ten days. The tournament runs 19 June to 17 July 2027. Even following your team to the final, most of your time in Kenya will be spent not watching football — and this is a very good country to have time in.

What follows is what we actually tell guests, in roughly the order we tell them. Some of it is twenty minutes away.

The one nobody believes until they have done it

There are lions inside the city limits. Nairobi National Park begins about fifteen minutes’ drive from Upper Hill — not a reserve a day away, an actual national park with rhino, giraffe, buffalo and lion, with the skyline of a capital city behind them.

Go at dawn. The gate opens at six, the animals are moving, the light is extraordinary and you are back in town by ten with the whole day left. It is the single best use of a free morning in Nairobi, and visitors who skip it because they assume a safari needs a week almost always regret it.

Half a day, no planning

• The Giraffe Centre and the elephant orphanage in Karen, about forty-five minutes out in traffic. Both are conservation projects rather than attractions, and both are better for it. The orphanage has a narrow visiting window — check the time before setting off, not after.
• The Karen Blixen Museum, the farmhouse from Out of Africa, in the same direction. Small, quiet, and worth an hour if you are already out that way.
• The Nairobi National Museum for the human-origins collection. The hominid fossils here are among the most important ever found, and they are presented without much fuss.
• Maasai Market, which moves around the city by day of the week. Bargaining is expected and not hostile — start at about a third and settle somewhere near half. Ask us which day and where.

Eating, which is the underrated part

Nairobi eats well and cheaply, and the good places are not the expensive ones.

What to actually order

• Nyama choma — grilled goat or beef, eaten with your hands, with kachumbari and ugali. This is the national dish in everything but name and the whole point is the long lunch around it.
• Pilau and biryani on the coast-influenced side of the menu, and samosas everywhere, reflecting a century of Indian Ocean trade.
• Chapati and beans from a small place at lunchtime, for about a dollar. Better than most things costing ten times more.
• Kenyan coffee, grown a few hours from here and, oddly, historically better abroad than at home. That has changed; the cafés in Westlands and Kilimani take it seriously now.

We have a longer piece on eating around Upper Hill for the days you do not want to travel for lunch.

Watching the matches you have no ticket for

Kenyans watch football in public, loudly and in numbers. Every neighbourhood has places showing matches on a screen, and during a tournament the atmosphere in them is better than the atmosphere in a half-full ground at a group game you have no stake in.

This is genuinely one of the best things about being here for the tournament rather than watching it at home — and it is the sort of thing worth asking a local about rather than searching for. Message us and we will point you somewhere good and tell you honestly what it will cost.

If you have a full day

• The Rift Valley. Stand at the escarpment viewpoint on the old Naivasha road and look at the thing geography lessons were about. Two hours out, with Lake Naivasha and its hippos at the end.
• Hell’s Gate, near Naivasha, which you can cycle through — one of very few parks in Africa where you are allowed out of the vehicle.
• Amboseli or the Mara if you have two or three days between knockout rounds. The Mara in late June is the start of the migration season, which is a considerable coincidence of timing.

Our weekend trips piece goes into these properly, including which are worth the drive and which are not.

Getting around between all this

Ride-hailing apps work well here and are the default for visitors. Fares are low by most standards and you avoid negotiating. For anything further than the city — the Rift Valley, the parks, a day in Karen with several stops — a driver for the day is better value than several separate trips, and considerably less tiring.

We arrange that with drivers we have used ourselves, and will tell you when something is a four-hour drive for a thirty-minute view. There is more in getting around Nairobi.