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| If given the chance, giraffes will headbutt you. |
We ended up having a fancy trip through East Africa, and it was magical and luxurious. We had an absolute blast together.
*We ended up spending time in Kenya and Tanzania. For the sake of organizing my thoughts, I have separated the countries in two blog posts.*
Our Kenya adventures revolved around animal safaris; so, once he arrived, we rented a giant SUV. I was anxious about him driving while here, as I’ve found driving around in Kenya to be frustrating and harrowing – and I’m just an Uber passenger! Drivers here appear to be a bit erratic in their following of road rules, in particular, the matatus (who may be suicidal, based on their crazy driving). What’s more, the roads are covered in potholes! Roads that aren’t riddled with holes probably have random speed bumps every hundred meters or so - roads and highways alike – and may or may not have street lights to illuminate where exactly the roads are at night. This means that there is a lot of swerving, near misses, knuckle-whitening, and ample swearing (from me the passenger). Luckily, though we encountered these things on our road trips, he is a great driver and the car (and humans) came out fine.
But I’m ahead of myself a bit.
Our first adventure included a four-hour drive north to a nature conservancy called Ol Pejeta, known for holding the last two Northern White Rhinos in the world. We fought off matatus and slow-going trucks up and down windy roads until we got there.
On our drive, we noticed that each roadside town seemed to each specializes in particular products that the community would sell at stalls to ongoing traffic. We started to name the towns based on their products: MangoTown, ChairTown, MaizeTown, BananaTown, PotatoTown, FlourTown…you get the point.
Once we registered our vehicle with the conservancy and got our accommodations sorted, we started meandering through the park….and almost immediately started running into animals while we drove around! About a few minutes into the conservancy we had to pause for a herd of zebras to cross the road, and an elephant was munching on a tree 150 meters away from us. It was magical – we didn’t need to look for animals at all; we only had to ride a few minutes past one animal before we approached another group of animals. We didn’t see leopards or cheetahs on our trip, but we saw most the other animals available in the conservancy: buffalo, antelope, gazelle, elephant, giraffe, zebra, bush pig, rhino, baboon, chimpanzee, warthog, and loads of cool birds. Ol Pejeta was quiet, too; we didn’t see many people, which was more than fine for us.
We met a lot of helmeted guineafowl on the park roads who would stupidly panic and stumble in front of our car on the road for a few minutes instead of getting out of our way, causing a lot of abrupt stops on our end. I, stupidly, couldn’t think of the appropriate bird type and started to call them bush turkeys, singing a bastardized version Roy Orbison’s famous song: “Bush turkey, walking down the street….”
We went on a Night Game Drive with the conservancy, where we ran into a bachelor group of lions lounging on our path, and a little way off a pride of female lions who resented their need to share the road. We also ran into some jackals, hyenas, and a herd of elephants with babies.
The next morning, we met the two last Northern White Rhinos one-on-one with a ranger, feeding them while safely stowed in the SUV. The first one (Najin) used our SUV as a scratching post for a few minutes, aggressively rocking the car (and us) back and forth; the second one (Fatu) happily took carrots out of our hands from the car windows.
We also drove around the outskirts of the conservancy and got quite lost (there are no street signs in nature). We eventually hightailed it back to the main area of the conservancy after escaping an angry elephant threatened to trample us if we didn’t leave her family alone.
Our last morning at Ol Pejeta, on Xmas day, started early with a bushwalk. We drove to the starting place right when the sun was coming up. We drove slowly through thick fog and eventually saw a spectacular view of Mount Kenya painted with a rainbow of sorbet colors in the sunrise. Once we met the ranger, we walked through the boggy bush to see some animals up close. We had to silently (and quickly) retreat from our walk once we got too close to a lone buffalo and rhino.
While at Ol Pejeta, we stayed at their Stables. It was simple, friendly, and quiet accommodations for us, and we ended up staying in a roundhouse like a yurt with its own bathroom. The Stables had “lights out” at 11pm quite literally, as the generator shut off until the morning.
We nearly hit a lamb on the road just outside of the conservancy when we were returning to Nairobi. It baa’ed resentfully at us.
The next day we flew to Zanzibar to beach bum for a while, but that’s a different story.
When we returned to Nairobi on New Year’s Eve, at the end of his visit, we continued our animal adventures.
We visited the Sheldrick Trust, where a group rehabilitates baby elephant orphans and releases them back into the wild. They currently have 15 elephant orphans under 5 years old. We went in the morning to watch the little elephants flop around and feed on giant bottles full of baby formula. Unfortunately, it was a cramped spectacle full of tourists and screaming children, and I felt stressed out for the elephants. I proposed we leave early and surprised my Mr. CT Lawyer with his Xmas present – I adopted an elephant orphan for him, who he was to meet more personally in the evening.
We then visited the nearby Giraffe Center. Each visitor got a coconut shell of pellets to feed the goofy giraffes, who greedily stuck out their blue tongues for more food over and over again, headbutting clueless visitors not fast enough with their treats. We also got to feed a few baby giraffes – 3 months old! –timidly sticking out and wiggling their tongues for treats and wobbling their furry head cones between gulps. There were some curious baby warthogs behind the giraffes, as well – they didn’t get very close, but watched while the giraffes poked around tourists for pellets.
In the evening, we went back to the Sheldrick Trust for an hour to meet his adopted elephant, Nabulu. Though there were still quite a few people there who wanted to meet their adopted elephants, it was a much quieter and intimate experience than the morning visit. We got to watch the elephants run past to their pens with dinner waiting there. We also followed the elephants to their rooms to watch them chew on a few leafy tree branches. Nabulu used her trunk to get some water from her trough in front of us and blew bubbles into it before sucking up some water. The water sounded like a toilet flushing when it emptied out of her trunk and into her mouth. We also met the other elephants there, petting a few and admiring the rest as they went through their evening rituals of eating, farting, and chilling.
We took it easy and spent the rest our Nairobi jaunts included fancy restaurants in the upscale suburb of Karen and malls in the nice eastern parts of the city. In my defense, I couldn’t think of city-specific adventures for us while he visited, and we were tired from the rest of the adventures. Some of the places we went to made us both feel more like we were in Europe than Africa, but we still had a lovely time. Some fast notes about those places (in case you need some ideas for future trips to Kenya).
- Dusit2 is an amazing and fancy 5-star hotel that will pamper you in the heart of Nairobi. But a heads up – it’s a resort, and it’s easy to feel like staying put there forever, with its food and pool and phenomenal service. Also, their PB&J Sundae is really addictive.
- Boho Eatery is an outdoor restaurant in Karen, and we had really tasty bowls of not-regional foods while the restaurant’s cat cuddled with us.
- We had our NYE dinner at Talisman in Karen. We had a really delicious meal with gluten-free bread and divine fish curry. He got a snapper bao bun that he is still talking about.
- We visited Cultiva Farms in Karen for a meal at some point. The ride getting there was wild and bumpy, but the food was really fresh and delightful to eat.
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