I just got back from a trip of Eastern Africa and I wanted to give some feedback to anyone going about the Masai Market in Nairobi. It is a great market with beautiful things and I do think you should definitely go if you are in Nairobi but there are are few things that may be beneficial to know before going.

There were a few of us from the tour that I was on that decided to cab it to the market...as soon as we got out of the taxi there were guys that came up to us and basically said how it worked was you selected what you wanted and then you could bargain for the price once you were done with everything. One guy held the stuff and another walked with you and knew where anything was if you were looking for something specific. He told me it was a community set up and they are paid every month. I walked around with the guys and at the end we sat down and started negotiating...the prices that they originally were asking were ridiculous..they say counter offer 50% lower but this was 75%...it was pretty unbelieveable how much they wanted to hose you. Also I have an app on my phone, doesn't use any data and wow did this come in handy. When we finally agreed to the final price his conversion was 2,000 shillings more!! I had to tell him what it was he disagreed and he punched it in his calculator and surprise surpirse it was the amount I had. One of the guys that was there as well got really hosed by this because he didn't have any conversion app and we had been to so many countries it was hard to remember what the rate was.

My feedback to you is don't use this guys, deal directly with the vendors themselves, you will probably get apprached and hassled but be direct and don't listen to them. You'll save yourself a lot of hassle in the end and I wish I had known this before I went to the market but luckily I don't mind bargaining so I think I did ok in this scenario but I can see how many other people may not. All of the people that I went with had the same experience with the guys that they were with, inaccurate conversion rates and ridiculous pricing.