NameRichard
Area CoveredKenya
InterestsLocal food & drink, Architecture, Language teaching, Team sports, Photography, Marine conservation, Relaxation & wellbeing, Adventure sports, Volunteering, Local history, Cultural traditions, Music, Environmental work, Ecology, Walking, trekking & hiking, Markets & shopping, Arts & literature, Wildlife watching

Introducing Richard - your Friend at the other End!

About Me

I'm a travel writer and journalist, author of the Rough Guide to Kenya and former director of communications at Rough Guides. I went freelance in 2006 to do more writing and editorial project management work. I have an MA in African Studies from London University (East African Ethnography, African Lingustics, Swahili Language & Literature) and a BSc Hons in Sociology from Kingston University. As well as the Rough Guide to Kenya (9th edition just published) I'm also the author or co-author of Rough Guides to First Time Africa (the second edition will be out in February 2011), West Africa (five editions), World Music and The Gambia. After lengthy student and travel years, I joined STA Travel in London to set up their Africa Desk, and then managed the Euston Road office. I moved to Rough Guides in 1990.

I first went travelling in 1975, and have travelled all over Africa, most parts of Europe, the USA, and many other places, including Guatemala, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Israel and Palestine. I have travelled on the thinnest of shoestrings (hitched across the Sahara and back twice and cycled through West Africa twice) and stayed in Kenya's most luxurious camps and lodges ($1000 a night places that were quite hard to leave the next morning). I live in southwest London and travel as often as possible, though I'm also deeply concerned about climate change, so always try to go by train if possible (unfortunately not to Kenya. . .). I know Kenya extremely well, having travelled the length and breadth of the country many times, most recently for three months in 2008/9 when I stayed in 70 different locations and travelled more than 10,000km.

I have many contacts in Kenya and regularly help friends and family with travel arrangements (have just organised a 50th birthday trip for two relatives and their friends). And I can always organise meet and greet arrangements, and transfers, even at short notice. I'll look forward to helping you get the most out of your trip.

Rough Guides Rough Guides Introduction to Kenya

Stretched across the equator, with the peaks of Mount Kenya - the second highest mountain in Africa - rising out of a natural environment of exceptional beauty, Kenya is a hugely rewarding place to travel. The country's dramatically diverse geography has resulted in a great range of natural habitats, harbouring a stunning variety of mammals and birds, while its history of migration and conquest has brought about a complex social panorama, which includes the Swahili city-states of the coast and the nomadic pastoralists of the Rift Valley. The world-famous national parks, unselfconsciously colourful peoples and superb beaches lend the country a genuinely exotic image with magnetic appeal.

But treating Kenya as a succession of tourist sights isn't the most stimulating way of experiencing the country. Travelling with your eyes open, you can enter the very different world inhabited by most Kenyans: a ceaselessly active landscape of farm and field, of streams and bush paths, of wooden and corrugated-iron shacks, tea shops and lodging houses, of crammed buses and pick-up vans, of overloaded bicycles, and of streets wandered by goats, chickens and toddlers. Off the more heavily trodden tourist routes, you'll find real warmth, openness and curiosity towards visitors. And out in the wilds, there is an abundance of superb scenery - vistas of rolling savanna dotted with Maasai and their herds, high Kikuyu moorlands, dense forests bursting with bird song and insect noise, and stony, shimmering desert - all of which comes crisply into focus when experienced in the context of an economically beleaguered African nation riven by deep social tensions.

Read more on Rough Guides or Buy the book

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