First, make a friend from your hostel to do stuff with. Meet Brittney. She's in Nairobi doing a fellowship with Kiva Foundation, a microfinance organization that uses the internet to directly connect donors with entrepreneurs in developing countries. Like Edna's hospital, Kiva Foundation was featured in Nicholas Kristof's book. It's a remarkable organization, and worth a look if you haven't seen the site before.
Find a driver, and head to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust's elephant orphanage. There are 10 or so baby elephants there right now, many because their mothers were killed by poachers. The babies live at the orphanage until they can be integrated back into the wild, in Tsavo National Park.
At 11 am everyday, the baby elephants get bottles of milk. First, they come trotting down the hill.
They head straight for the bottles.
They guzzle the milk like nobody's business.
Then the frolic in the waterhole for a little while.
I have an amazing video of them playing in the water, but the internet isn't good enough to load it, so look for it when I'm back in the US :)
The littlest ones have trouble getting up the slippery banks.
They also like to have dirt thrown on them?
Warthogs show up sometimes.
When they're done playing, the baby elephants trot back off up the hill.
When you're done at the elephant orphanage, go see the giraffes at the creatively named Giraffe Center, which was set up in the 1970s to protect the endangered Rothschild giraffe, found only in the grasslands of East Africa.
One even kissed me.
Okay, maybe two kissed me.
All I'm going to say is, who needs a facial when you have an 18-inch giraffe tongue to exfoliate your face? And I didn't know it was possible to love giraffes even more than I did, but it turns out it is. Even if they are ridiculous looking.
Next, head to the Karen Blixen (who wrote under the name of Isak Dinesin because she believed women authors sold more poorly than men) house, where the author of Out of Africa lived and where much of the movie with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford was filmed. It's a beautiful spot, and a bit hard to believe it's almost in the middle of Nairobi. It's in a suburb called Karen, after her.
The Kazuri Bead Factory (Kazuri means "small and beautiful" in Swahili) is right behind the Karen Blixen House. It was initially started in 1975 to provide regular employment to single mothers and has dramatically expanded operations and now employs 400 people, mostly single mothers, many from Kibera, Africa's largest slum.
The ceramic beads are beautiful, made from clay from around Mount Kenya.
And there were monkeys. After the Great Mombasa Angry Monkey Incident of 2007 (hi, Michelle!), I don't get very close to monkeys while taking their picture. That's what the zoom function is for.
We finished up with lunch at Tamambo, the garden cafe on the grounds of the Karen Blixen House. It's a beautiful setting, "oozing colonial charm." I couldn't have said it better myself.
I appreciated this meal the way only someone who's been eating goat for a month can.
I didn't need dinner.
Now I'm back at Wildebeest Camp, hanging out around the campfire and writing this :)
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