After
a rough night (I woke up around 2:15 a.m. and couldn’t get back to
sleep) we departed at 9:00 a.m. to drive back down to Nairobi to visit
the
David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which shelters and raises baby elephants.
Many have been orphaned due to poaching for ivory (boo, hiss), and a
surprising number of them were also found after falling into a well. 2
groups of of approximately 14 baby elephants ranging from 8 months to 3
years made a grand entrance with their handlers and were fed their
bottles of milk in front of the 150-200 people along the perimeter of
the feeding area. Then the babies got to play in the dirt and mud, with
balls and each other. It was awesome, and we could pet them on their
sides as they walked by. The goal of the organization is to care for
the elephants until they can start to fend for themselves, then
reintroduce them back into the wild as long as it takes for them to be
adopted into a herd.
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| Big Baby Bottle |
Then, we went to the
Giraffe Center, where we were able to feed the several giraffes who
would come to and fro from the forest to take alfalfa pellets and tree
leaves from guests. Near the end of our visit both John and I fed
treats to a giraffe and found their tongues to be gentle, rough in
texture and slimy. For a lunch snack (how is that for a segue), I
picked a veggie samosa that perfectly cooked and very spicy, which was a perfect cap to the afternoon.
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| Regal. |
During this whole day trip
between sites we ended up getting lost several times, because Nairobi
has been in the middle of a building boom, so Cherry and Vance didn’t
have their usual reference points. With new roundabouts, other ones cut
off, some new highway sections, many new apartment homes and shopping
malls you can really see the old vs. new side by side. I suspect that
if we came back in 20 years all of the older types of businesses (in my
mind I think of them as the original strip mall, made of corrugated
metal), will be built over. Another interesting thing I noticed is that
every shopping area seemed to have a butchery. Every one.
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| Where ARE we?! |
On
our way back to the house, we stopped at
The Village Market. a local mall where I decided I
needed more to eat and saw that the food court had many great choices,
including lamb samosas. These were more on the greasy side, but they
had pineapple chutney and I finally was full. We also revisited the mall at the end of the trip, and I really enjoyed both times there. Probably because it was something familiar and similar to home in one way (especially the live musician performing pop songs from Ed Sheeran) but also exotic, particularly in the food court area, where you could observe people from all over the world having a meal, and where the food choices where between Indian, African, Thai, Chinese, and many other world food flavors. There was a Pizza Hut too, but it was a food cart outside the mall!
Jeff and I decided to
withdraw some shillings from an ATM for pocket money, but we both
miscalculated the decimal point (total currency exchange rate fail) and withdrew 10x more money than we had
intended, so I was walking around with a huge chunk of cash in my purse. That felt really odd and a bit scary. It turned out that by the end of the trip we did indeed need and spent all that cash, so it turned out to be a fortuitous mistake.
Phrase learned today: Mama Brian…the name a woman takes is her son’s name
after the word “mama”. So I would be addressed as “Mama John”. Which
is similar to having a school aged child where you introduce yourself to
other parents as “John’s Mom."
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| First time driving by the Kibera Slum. Mindbogglingly vast. |
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