Out of Africa by way of Kenya
As Henry detailed earlier, our flights to Tanzania were pretty exhausting, so there was no reason to believe that leaving there would be any easier. After several days of sun and fun in some of the most beautiful beaches my privileged feet have ever walked on, we left the Zanzibar island and flew back to Arusha in mainland Tanzania. There, we drove the 1 hour to Kilimanjaro where we would fly out the next day. Truth be told, because of limited web access and using the phone to arrange this leg of the trip, we didn’t quite know where our flight the next morning was going to. We only knew we were flying out at 6am and that there would be a six hour layover. Henry assumed that we were just reversing the flight path into Tanzania so the layover would be in Dar es Salaam, but surprisingly, our flight out of Kilimanjaro was going to Nairobi, Kenya – the very city that Lonely Planet coins “the most dangerous city” in Africa, beating out stiff competition from Johannesburg and Lagos. With six hours to kill, Henry and I set out to explore this capital city. After playing twenty questions with who we thought were the airport-employed information desk and buying 15min of internet time each to research Nairobi’s sights, attractions, and safety, Henry and I returned to the information desk and booked ourselves a private car and driver who would take us to breakfast, a bit of souvenir shopping, a tour of the elephant orphanage (a top rated attraction on Tripadvisor), and then return we to the airport. As Jeff, our driver/guide later told us, those unlabeled airport information desks dotted throughout the airport are in fact all employed by a private touring company. Deceptively clever but at quite reasonable rates.
Of course, the highlight of that brief excursion was the elephant orphanage. This elephant and rhino orphanage run by The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org) offers daily public viewing times where people can come and watch these orphaned baby elephants feed on rather gigantic milk bottles between 11am and 12noon. The only exception to this time slot is if you decide to adopt an elephant for $50 a year, then you can return at 5pm to tuck your baby elephant to bed. As we learned, most of these orphaned elephants are victims of poachers whose moms were injured or killed for the tusks, others fell into man-made wells and simply could not get out. Because a baby elephant relies on its mother’s milk every 3hrs until the age of two, the death of a mother elephant automatically means the death of the baby. It was quite heartening to see so many baby elephants being saved, thriving, and acting quite goofy at feeding time. After about 5 years at the orphanage, the elephants will then be introduced back into the wild, under close supervision by park rangers. This supervision can go on for another 5 years until the orphaned elephant is fully accepted into an elephant herd.
As we discovered, Kenyans, unlike what our Tanzanian friends told us, are quite charming and friendly. We left Nairobi impressed and with a new found respect for Kenya. Maybe this is the place to be for our next safari?
And now, onwards to Israel by way of Dubai.
