KERICHO, named after the early English tea planter John Kerich, is Kenya's tea capital, a fact that – with much hype from the tourism machine embellished by the presence of the Tea Hotel – is not likely to escape you. Its equable climate and famously reliable, year-round afternoon rain showers make it the most important tea-growing area in Africa. While many of the European estates have been divided and reallocated to small farmers since Independence, the area is still dominated by giant tea plantations. Compact and orderly, Kericho itself seems as neat as the serried rows of bushes that surround it.

The central square has shady trees and flowering bushes – a bandstand would make it complete – and even the matatu park has lawns around it. It's a gentle, hassle-free place to wander, the people mild-mannered. Clipped, clean and functional, there's little of the shambolic appearance of most up-country towns. And, in many ways, it's an oddity. With so many people earning some sort of salary on the tea plantations or in connection with them, and so few acres under food or market crops, the patterns of small-town life are changed here. Most workers live out on the estates, their families often left behind in the home villages.

Kericho is above all an administrative and shopping centre, and a relay point for the needs of the estates. The produce market is small and trading limited. Everything seems to close at 5pm.

In town, there's a substantial Asian population. Many of the streets have a strikingly oriental feel – single-storey dukas fronted by colonnaded walkways where the plantation "memsahibs" of forty or fifty years ago presumably did their shopping. This curious, composite picture is completed by the grey stone Holy Trinity Church, with its small assembly of deceased planters in a miniature cemetery. Straight out of the English shires and entwined with creepers, it tries so hard to be Norman that it's a pity to point out that it was only built in 1952.

(With acknowledgement to yahoo.com)