Kissing giraffes, hugging cheetahs and meeting our fellow travellers (Nairobi)

In October 2005 I looked at a map of the world.  In the middle sat a giant, mysterious, gently beckoning landmass unknown to me.  Prophetically a local tour company specializing in small groups and sustainable tourism e-mailed me their brochure the next day. “Sign me up for ‘Cultural Kenya’,” I instructed the bubbly agent.

When her hockey tour to Scotland/South Africa was cancelled, I persuaded my friend Alison to join in my African adventure. I reassured her multiple times that the tour hyperlink was correct – yes, I know it’s not my usual style of travel, but really, I’m okay with camping, no really, I’ve already paid my deposit, I won’t back out, seriously, let’s do it. My charms finally beat her into submission.

In the month preceding the trip I had been enthusiastically (one might say compulsively) studying Swahili on line, so our Kenya Airways flight to Nairobi afforded the first bona fide opportunity to showcase my skills. I successfully conveyed “I drink water” and “I want chicken” to the flight staff, but I knew I still had a ways to go when I translated one of the signs on the plane as “toilets are animals”.

Baby elephant and rhino orphanage, Nairobi

Our African adventure began shortly after arriving at 5 am. Before we had even left the airport grounds, Ali and I saw zebras. Zebras! Right there on the side of the road.  As our tour didn’t officially begin until that evening, our driver offered to take us to Nairobi’s local animal shelters. We began with an orphanage for abandoned baby elephants, which would have been a lovely experience except for the two hundred other people who were there with us, and that we were positioned precisely between two guides who were talking simultaneously with different scripts. Disheartened by our “African Lion Safari” experience, we cautiously moved onto the next stop, the Giraffe Centre.

Giraffe hoping for food

The Giraffe Centre was an absolute delight.  Alison immediately fell in love, which I worried would result in her acquiring a staggering volume of giraffes in various forms and materials before she returned home.  It was a giraffe feeding sanctuary, which, by being on a raised platform, allowed immediate contact with these animals by way of giant giraffe tongues delicately copping food pellets from our lips.

We then had to decide if we should go to the Nairobi National Reserve: would it be another touristy disaster like the elephants, or transformative like the giraffes? Our hearts filled with dread when we entered the safari walk: it was a zoo.  A zoo with a twist, as it turned out.  Its residents had been rescued from the wild for various reasons, which meant that they were used to human contact. Unlike lions and leopards, who can never be kept into adulthood despite human raising, cheetahs adapt and bond with humans for the rest of their lives, a good thing given that we were taken right to a cheetah for petting.

Pet cat, African style

Like a massively overfed house cat, it snuggled and purred.  Yes, the zoo-not-a-zoo thing was confusing, but it gave us the chance to see animals we weren’t guaranteed to see in the wild, or at least not that closely.

Prior to meeting our fellow travellers, Ali and I had just enough time to squeeze in a drink.  Picture this: kicking back on a second floor patio, drinking chilled 500 ml bottles of Tusker beer, the sun setting gently behind the high rises, overhead a half moon encircled by birds. Now imagine the waiter coming to us with great concern because our bags were sitting on the table, not clutched by a death grip in our laps.  I’ll remind you this was a second floor patio, and we were the only ones on it. Nairobbery indeed.

There were nine of us in the group plus Jean-Luc, our French, Spain-based tour company representative who joined us on this trip’s maiden voyage. All Canadian (no Americans to blame), mostly from Toronto, and lovely: Jim and Merilee, retired from BC; Sherry and Emilio, the latter a firefighter (a fellow traveller who saves lives for a living!); Lilah, with her impressive bag of vitamins and weird superstitions, like single people shouldn’t sit at table corners; and Beth from Ottawa.  And then there was Darcy.  Darcy, who showed up late for our first-day animal sanctuary tours wearing a “Girls do it better and look better doing it” midriff t-shirt, fully equipped with digital camcorder, digital camera, I-Pod, and a complaint for nearly everything. This is someone who while in India ate at Pizza Hut every day.  We were genuinely puzzled by her purpose in Africa.

We had our first dinner together at a hopping restaurant, Kosewe. I had coconut fish, ugali (the national staple starch, like cream of wheat-flavoured polenta), and a green vegetable that tasted exactly like a tea bag. The atmosphere was enlivened by a Kenyan army high life band doing crowd favourites like La Bamba. I particularly liked eating the ugali which is broken off by (a Purell detoxed) hand then rolled into a ball for dipping into food.  Anyone who’s seen me eat a muffin knows that I’m comfortable with this technique.