Kenya - Pre-tour

After 15 hours in the air and five hours in airports, we arrived in Nairobi, Kenya. Happily, I can report that our shrink wrapped luggage also arrived without drama. Nairobi is five hours behind Perth and one hour in front of Johannesburg. We were picked up by our hotel, the Crowne Plaza Nairobi. We had a swim, downed a drink or two and got some in-room dining before passing out for the night around 8-8:30pm (1-1:30am Perth time).

Waking up in Kenya, we had no official plans for the day. At 6pm, we were due to meet our Intrepid group for the first part of our tour (our Gorilla trek), but that was the only planned event for the day.

We consulted with the hotel's concierge who recommended we go to the David Shedrick Wilderness Trust, which is a group that cares for orphaned elephants (and rhino) and then onto a Giraffe Centre. We had a hotel car take us around, the first stop being the elephant orphanage. Quite a few other people had the same idea as there was already a crowd gathered despite it being 45 mins before opening.

We were led to a large roped area where we waited for the elephants to come to. Scattered around the area were large bottles of milk and some green foliage. At 11am, some workers emerged from the nearby bushes with about 12 baby elephants in tow. The elephants obviously knew what was happening because the picked up speed and headed for the milk bottles, which the workers helped them to drink from. They were very cute. After drinking, the trainers encouraged them over to the ropes where the public got an opportunity to touch and pat the elephants. Other elephants played with soccer balls while one of the workers explained how each of the elephants came to the orphanage (quite a few found down wells!). Another group of slightly older elephants came in after the babies – about a further 11 to repeat the process.

We left the elephant orphanage and headed for the giraffe centre, which wasn't too far away. Here there was an elevated viewing platform from which you could feed giraffes, what I can only best describe as kitty litter pellets (obviously food of some description). The giraffes have really long tongues, which are quite soft and not as slimy as you might think. They were generally very timid (but hungry!) animals, although there was warning signs instructing you to watch for headbutts! We didn't stay here long as we quickly ran out of food for them and were in need of food for ourselves. We headed back to the hotel for some lunch, checkout and transfer to the hotel were we are meeting the tour group at.

We have our group meeting at 6pm tonight, which it looks like it'll actually be a meeting for four different tours. Next update when we can from somewhere into our tour!