Trip To Niarobi, Kenya

Yesterday Kathleen was not feeling well so Nicholas and I took the trip from Mombasa, Kenya(where we were docked) to Niarobi(I thought Niarobi was a country instead of a city).
Actually it is the largest city between Cairo and Johannesburg.
Kenya is a country of 37,000,000 people with 42 different tribes each with their own language. Like the US they limit theiir President to 2 terms(5 years each). They export coffee to Starbucks in the US and flowers to Netherlands. The people were really friendly.


This was the house of one Alan Donovan who has lived in Kenya for 40 years and exports African art. The house was full of really neat stuff. We had lunch there. Only problem with this was that we ate outside in the tents(with way too many flies for Nicholas and me). Nicholas with a warrior. The park is behind the tents.

People were building on the Right of Way for the highway. The government told them to tear down and they did not so the government went through and tore down the building back to the Right of Way line.

Here we went to the Giraffe Center(home to the African Fund For Endangered Wildlife). They take in baby or injured Giraffes and take care of them and also are trying to restock the wild with the Rothschild giraffes which were almost exstinct.

Nicholas and I both let them eat out of our hands. You should have seen him in the bathroom washing his hands after the giraffe licked his hand(me too actually).

We went to the home of Karen Von Blixen, the author of Out Of Africa(the book that the movie was based on).

This lady(Daphne Sheldrick) and her deceased husband(who was the original Ranger at the park) have taken care of baby elephants

who have lost their parents(usually by poachers who killed them for the Ivory). Her stories of the intelligence and memory of the elephants was remarkable. For example, one of the elephants they had released into the wild, came back 10 years later with her baby to show the baby to her handlers at the park. She brought the baby in and showed it off and then went back to the wild.

The elephants love to lie in the mud and have dirt thrown on them.


Nicholas petting a baby elephant.

Kathleen got to feeling better while we were gone so she and Mary went out on the pier where all the vendors are set up. She took her tennis shoes that were too small and a couple of ball point pens and traded for all kinds of things. The barter system is alive and well.

Mary is not here as I write this and therefore no one to correct spelling grammer. So forgive me the errors. Charles