Nairobi

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Sunday, July 29 — Tuesday, July 31: Nairobi, Kenya

We arrived in Nairobi in the wee hours of the morning (around 5 am) and took a cab to our hotel. Nairobi (endearingly referred to by many as “Nai-robbery”) is home to the second largest slum after Johannesburg and is the second most dangerous city after Johannesburg. Given this, John and I very conservative in our touring of the city.

After checking into our hotel, we both hit the bed for a few hours. A large part of our first day in Nairobi was spent relaxing in the hotel. In the afternoon, the hotel arranged for us to talk with a driver about driving us around the following day to see some of the sights of Nairobi. There is not much to see in the actual city, but in the Langata and Karen suburbs, there are some animal parks and other sites worth taking a look at.

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We arranged for the driver to pick us up the following morning. In the meantime, the driver showed us Nairobi that afternoon and dropped us off at a restaurant for lunch. We saw the government and other official buildings and offices in the city and had hamburgers at a café. Afterwards, we bought some groceries at the local supermarket and had tea masala at an outdoor café. We were back in our hotel by 6:30 pm.

The following day, the driver picked us up and we set out to see the Nairobi Safari Walk, the Karen Blixen Museum, the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the Langata Giraffe Center, and the Bomas (“hut”) of Kenya. The Nairobi Safari Walk was like a zoo, however many of the animals are not in confined spaces. A well-informed guide took us along a safari-like boardwalk through the animals to see a pygmy hippo, a white rhino, and many other animals. There was even a cheetah that has been raised in captivity that they can summon from the woods and you can pet. This made me quite nervous, but I did stand still long enough for a picture.

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The Karen Blixen Museum is the farmhouse where the Danish author who wrote Out of Africa lived between 1914 and 1931. She went to Kenya to start a coffee plantation, but eventually left Africa for personal reasons (her marriage ended, her lover died in a plane crash, and her plantation went bankrupt). The book has made into a movie staring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford that featured scenes of the outside of the Blixen house.

The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust is a nonprofit organization that raises orphaned black rhinos and elephants and reintroduces them into the wild. The animals are orphaned as a result of illegal poaching, altercations with farmers and locals, loss of natural habitat, and illness. The baby elephants were fascinating to watch. Each has its own keeper who stays with them most of the time. The keeper is responsible for working with and teaching the elephants about a lot of things including how to behave around people. When the elephants do something wrong, they are scolded and given a wagging finger. Because of the elephants superb memory, it is very important that the keeper makes up with the elephant afterwards by talking to it and giving it attention otherwise the keeper may find himself in a bad situation with an upset elephant. The elephants let the keepers know by their behavior when they are ready to go back to the wild. Because a herd in the wild must accept the introduced elephants, reintroduction into the wild can take up to nine years to find an accepting herd.

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The Langata Giraffe Centre raises giraffes and reintroduces them to the wild. Here, we hand fed many giraffes and John even gave one a kiss.

The Bomas (“huts”) of Kenya is a cultural center where resident musicians and dancers perform traditional music and dances from the 16 various tribal groups in Kenya. One of the largest tribal groups in Kenya that has retained its culture is the Masai tribe, a herder society. They can easily be spotted by the red-checkered wraps they wear to scare lions away from their herds of cattle and sheep. At the Bomas of Kenya it is also possible to see examples of the huts and village settings many of the tribes traditionally lived in.

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The following morning was market day. Every Tuesday, Kenyans from all around Nairobi (some traveling over 100 kilometers) come to the market to sell their wares, including T-shirts, wooden carvings, jewelry, beaded items, batik pictures, and anything else you can imagine. The market was literally right outside our hotel so we were able to have a quick walk around before setting off for the airport. John got a T-shirt and I got a women and baby Masai doll.