riontel | Kenya: Part II

Our second day in Nairobi started with a particularly important task: a visit to the travel agency to pay for all the scheduled trips for the rest of our stay, including the car for the safari. With that out of the way, we got to the serious business of touristing with David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage.

Orphanage rescues young elephants and provides care for them until they are old enough to start getting reintroduced to the wild at which point they get moved to a facility in Tsavo, one of the big national parks. Many baby elephants end up orphaned because of poachers, who kill their mothers, or due to droughts. These babies, if found, get moved to the orphanage. A team of keepers there takes care of them around the clock, twenty four hours a day. They get fed every three hours with special milk formula (it took Dr. Daphne Sheldrick years to develop a successful formula), covered by blankets if it gets too cold, cooled down if it gets too hot and generally kept healthy and happy. No single keeper takes care of the same elephant for any prolong period to prevent the animals from forming close attachments. Elephants are very social and if they get attached and the keeper goes away, they might get depressed, sick or even die, so the keepers constantly rotate.

Elephants gulp down their two bottles of formula within seconds and then spend time playing around in the muck, as any normal kids do when there is a puddle of water and some mud available.

The elephants in the center can only be viewed during few feeding hours, one of two groups at a time, first younger then slightly older ones. The rest of the time they are taken away somewhere deeper in the park.

From the orphanage we moved to the Giraffe Centre.

Giraffes roam freely around the 60 yards of the sanctuary territory but there is a small raised structure available for the visitors that allows them to see giraffes on the level of their heads, so you can pet them and feed them some snacks.

There are three giraffe subspecies in Kenya. The center houses Rothschild giraffes, the other two, Masai and Reticulated, we saw later in national parks. The subspecies differ in the number of horns, size and spot patterns but they all have very sticky prehensile tongues and spend most of their lives eating. They only sleep for about half an hour a day!

Giraffes were not feeling too social, it was too hot and most of them stuck to the shade away from noise and tourists.

We made an attempt to visit Karen Blixen home-museum. She is the author of "Out of Africa", which I haven't read. Apparently there was some movie I haven't seen as well. I've read Joy Adamson's "Born free" but there weren't any museums for that. When we found out that the charge for non-residents was eight times the price of entry for residents we turned away. N. forgot his resident card at home and I didn't have any interest in any museums. BTW, it's universal in Kenya that tourists pay more. All my tickets and hotel room charges were at least twice the price of N.'s.

We replenished ourselves at the Carnivore restaurant, which up until 2004 used to serve all sorts of game meats, such as zebra, antelopes, buffalo, etc., but has now been forced by law to move to more traditional beef and lamb with some crocodile and ostrich thrown in. While my meat-eating companions enjoyed the all-you-can eat feast brought by waiters on huge skewers and cut to order by machetes I enjoyed the show and had some grilled red snapper.

Finally we stopped by a Kentmere Country Club, about 20 km from Nairobi. Besides having sentimental value for N. and his family, they used to spend a lot of time there, it also boasts beautiful gardens. We had our afternoon tea and enjoyed the scenery before heading back to Nairobi.