This time, we hired a car for the day, and head out with a goal in mind: animals. Animals are a big deal in Africa, and Nairobi's theme seems to be "animals you can touch." We started with a baby elephant sanctuary where the elephants were fed and played right in front of us, and then some friendly ones were invited to walk around the perimeter and we could touch and interact with them. We also went to a giraffe sanctuary where you could feed the giraffes right out of your hand, and decided we were too tired for the crocodile farm, where apparently you can hold baby crocodiles. Um, sometimes wild animals are supposed to be wild! The elephant orphanage seemed like a really neat place with a genuine mission and philosophy. They bring in baby elephants too young to survive on their own, keep them until they're old enough in this area, and then have two more camps in a national park. The elephants gradually go out into the wild from these camps, and keep returning at night for as long as they need to, until eventually they are accepted into a herd and stay wild -- a process that takes 5-10 years, depending on the individual! So while they are in the orphanage, they become accustomed to humans in many ways, but at the same time they are trying to keep them prepared to go back to being wild elephants one day. It was pretty amazing.
As for the giraffe sanctuary, I was less sure about a mission, other than "giraffes are really neat, and if people get to touch them, then they will like giraffes better," or something like that. We spent most of our time on the wilderness trails, which we really enjoyed. It was neat to see the natural dry-land forest of the area.
In the middle, we had lunch in a mall. We had pasta and cappuccino (at least one of us did; the other one had three sips of strawberry smoothie), and had another quick chance to go shopping. My clothes are getting all worn out, and I'm looking forward to doing the last adoption errands not looking like a bag lady! I thought this was a nice outfit, which is good because it was about the only thing in the entire store that wasn't awful on me. The kind of colors which suit a quiet, Soft-Summer blond, are not exactly the ones that are widely stocked in Africa!
Then we went back to the hotel. The idea was that we would take a shower and go out for an early dinner, but the hot water ran out during Emerson's bath-ish thing. It turned out that they didn't have the power on for the hot water, so we had to wait for it to heat up. Goodbye, early dinner! I was feeling frustrated and irritated, but at the same time, some quiet time in the hotel was probably good for us. Emerson intently played legos on the hotel bed, of course. It seems so much easier traveling with one child than three, that I forget that I still need to take things at child-pace.
I was half tempted to skip the nice dinner, but I decided we would go after all. I selected a place that the guidebook had been a historical start-and-end fine dinner for Kenyan safaris. There was a sign behind our table commemorating 50 years of operation, from some time in the 1950's! A nice dinner turned out to be just what we needed to wrap up our little trip. We had some delicious food, the waiters were a combination of western-level competence, and African-style friendliness, and it was a calm way to end the day and the trip.
The picture captions have more about the specific events of the day. Go halfway through the album, to the sleeping boy, to see the second day.
Kenya pictures
No comments:
Post a Comment