Yesterday, thanks to jetlag, we woke up early and enjoyed a lovely buffet breakfast at the Boma Hotel with a huge variety of different foods from all around the world. After breakfast and a walk through the grounds we took off with Albert our personal guide and our hosts Liz and Tenai to explore the city of Nairobi, one of the only cities that shares its grounds with a national park and where lions have roamed the streets.
We set off skirting the national park to bring us to our first stop, the Giraffe Center, which shares the grounds with the historic Giraffe Manor. This is a breeding center for the endangered Rothschild Giraffe and you can get up close and personal, if your lucky even sneaking in a kiss. After sanitizing, we drove over to David Sheldricks Elephant Orphanage and spent the hour watching baby elephants that ranged from a few months old to 3 years be fed by their handlers and play in the mud. These animals were taken in as orphans from poaching, drought, and starvation just to name a few and will be released back into the wild at as young as 5 years old.
As we continued to explore the Karen region, we visited the peaceful and serene grounds of the Hemingways Boutique Hotel, saw beautiful jacarandas in full bloom and visited Kazuri beads which employs almost 340 local women in a coop style organisation that aids them with housing and healthcare. The story of the area brought us to the Karen Blixen museum, for which the area is named.
It was now time to hit the heart of Nairobi, and fortunately it was a Sunday so the traffic was light with most people walking. We escaped crazy downtown to explore the lush gardens of the Fairmont Norfolk. From this well located hotel, right across from the National Theatre, we toured a small corner of downtown.
Finally the airport called with good news and we headed to the arrivals terminal to pick up our long awaited bags!
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