Current Time in Thika, Kenya

Thika lies in central Kenya, about forty kilometres north-east of Nairobi in Kiambu County, at the point where the Thika and Chania rivers meet on the edge of the central highlands. The town stands at roughly fifteen hundred metres above sea level, high enough for a mild climate with warm days and cool nights, and on clear mornings the snows of Mount Kenya can be seen far to the north while the flat-topped mass of Ol Donyo Sabuk rises to the east.

Around a quarter of a million people live in the town and its immediate surroundings, and the population has grown quickly as Nairobi has expanded. Thika is one of the most important industrial centres in Kenya, with textile mills, food canneries, tanneries, paper and packaging plants, cement works and vehicle assembly. Above all it is associated with pineapples: the vast plantations on the plains west of the town supply canneries that make Kenya one of the world's leading exporters of the fruit, and coffee and macadamia estates surround the town on other sides.

The settlement began as a colonial trading post and river crossing at the start of the twentieth century, on the route from Nairobi towards Mount Kenya, and the railway reached it in 1913. British settler farming shaped the district, and the memoirist Elspeth Huxley made the area famous worldwide with The Flame Trees of Thika, her account of a childhood on a farm here before the First World War, later adapted for television.

The most striking attraction is Fourteen Falls, where the Athi river drops over a broad rock ledge in a curtain of white water about twenty-seven metres high, especially impressive after the rains. Chania Falls and Thika Falls lie in the town itself beside the historic Blue Post Hotel, which has welcomed travellers since 1908. A short drive away is Ol Donyo Sabuk National Park, a forested mountain full of buffalo, colobus monkeys and birdlife, with a summit path leading to sweeping views over the plains and the grave of the settler Sir William Northrup McMillan.

Life in Thika mixes industry and agriculture with a busy market town atmosphere. Kikuyu is the main local language alongside Swahili and English, and the town centre is full of small traders, matatu stages, churches and open-air eating places serving nyama choma, githeri and roasted maize.

Thika has become a significant education centre. Mount Kenya University has its main campus here, several other universities and colleges have opened branches, and the large agricultural and technological university at nearby Juja adds thousands more students to the area.

The eight-lane Thika Superhighway, completed in 2012, transformed connections with Nairobi and reduced the journey to under an hour, while a revived commuter rail service and busy bus routes serve the surrounding region.

Thika is important as one of Kenya's industrial and agricultural engines, a gateway to waterfalls and mountain parks, and a fast-growing satellite of the capital with a literary reputation that reaches far beyond Africa.