Safari to Kenya – New Jersey to Nairobi

I am grievously wounded, having left a piece of my heart behind in Kenya and somehow changed forever!  Nothing, neither pictures (video included) nor words can quite capture the essence of the experience but try I must.  Maybe, just maybe, years down the road, these words, photos, or videos trip the right synapses between the right neurons (is that even how it works?) and cause my brain to serve up a memory, a smell, a feeling, or a glimpse of a moment on this, my most unforgettable trip anywhere. (I started 2022 with a compulsive urge to travel, to see the world and to catch up on many lost years staying home focused on work.  It is going to be very hard for another place on this planet to top this experience!)

This accounting is chronological and deeply personal, in the sense that what I value may not be of particular interest to you.  But I suppose all writing is somehow similarly biased.  Hopefully, you have fun reading some or all of this, and find the little tidbits I picked up along my journey, my Safari (Swahili for Journey!), of interest. This is part 1 of many parts.  Hopefully, I can get the whole trip chronicled over the next few days to make this a lasting record to look back at in the years to come!

Getting There (Tuesday, March 1 and Wednesday, March 2)

Getting there was in two words, “mostly uneventful”.  We Uber’ed it to JFK from Parsippany with Melissa (Ben) on 01-March.  They got us to the airport well on time, indeed we had a full 4 hours to departure, the check in counters were just opening and we had no wait time at all in line.  Formalities were blessedly quick and soon we were at the gate waiting for boarding to be called.  We got ourselves some food while waiting and took some pictures of the beautiful KLM Boeing 787-10 named the “Flying Dutchman” that was to transport us to Amsterdam. 

The flight was quiet, not too packed and we were at the arrival gate in Schiphol Airport 15 minutes ahead of the scheduled 7:30am CET.  After using the facilities, we settled ourselves down at a nice coffee shop with a view of the active runways and treated myself to an excellent cup of Dutch coffee (tea for Iris).  I find that watching the airport staff load, unload, refuel, clean and do other things to turn around the planes at gates, and watching planes taxi, take off and land is always fun.  But, in the meantime, my mind was far away looking ahead to the Safari, getting away from the hustle and bustle of industrial-scale transport operations and breathing some clean, fresh, un-sanitized air directly through my own nostrils, as opposed to the pesky masks that continue to be a necessity, seeing animals and birds in their natural habitat before we humans mess that up any further!  There was also some trepidation mixed in with the anticipation – Would we run into issues during this trip (after all Kenya was still very much a developing nation)?  Would we see the animals we hoped to?  Would we end up not enjoying ourselves?  Etc.  You get the drift.  I decided to forget about worrying and to just enjoy things as they happened – something I frequently find helps in day-to-day life.

After a pleasant hour at the coffee shop, we walked around a bit, shopped Duty Free for some of our hosts in Kenya and whiled away the short couple of hours before it was time to board our 8-hour flight on another Dreamliner, also a Boeing 787-10, to Nairobi.  This one left a few minutes late as there were some passengers who boarded late with carry-on luggage that had nowhere to go in the overheads.  This was quite frustrating to watch.  I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for the passengers concerned or annoyed at them! This flight was crammed to the gills, but the crew did an admirable job in coping with the resulting extra workload.  Being a day-time flight, it was a little more interesting; as usual, I set my screen to show all the flight parameters.  It is fun to fly over countries and places you have never been to but are on your bucket list!  Time wore on and we crossed over Germany, then southern Europe and then across the Mediterranean into Egypt and later Sudan.  Around 5:30pm Amsterdam time (my phone hadn’t yet switched time zones since it was in Airplane mode), I was treated to my first sunset over Africa, a truly other worldly experience.  I think this was a little south and east of Khartoum in Sudan (I had to reconstruct where we’d have been at sunset from the Flight Aware website, to work that out!).

About an hour before landing, the crew served us yet another snack, what looked like a cross between a pizza and a calzone.  Shortly after that we were passing over a lake of some kind.  I think that must have been Lake Nakuru based on my memory of its location – one of our Safari destinations.  Then, it was time to land at Nairobi.  The plane touched down perfectly and the Kenyan contingent burst into applause, nice to hear! As we waited to deplane, you could faintly smell Africa through the open door, a heady mix of the cool evening air and something mysteriously tropical!  Did you know that Nairobi is about 5800 feet above sea level? 

Jomo Kenyatta International Airport was organized chaos.  Lines were formed in the middle of a corridor that led to Immigration and Customs with predictable results – people cut the line when they could!  Government employees checked Covid paperwork etc. and then we rushed off to Immigration and Baggage claim/Customs where we ended up screening our bags through yet another X-Ray machine, again a tad frustrating, but by now I was going with the flow!  And then, we were out of the terminal, to find a Gamewatchers Safaris employee holding up a placard with my name on it.  We were quickly led to our vehicle and off we went over a reasonably quiet highway (little did we know what it would look like during rush hour!) to the Sarova Panafric hotel where we would be staying till early Friday morning (we landed Wednesday evening at 10pm).  Benson, at the hotel front-desk checked us in and then walked us to the room.

A day in Nairobi (Thursday, March 3)

We didn’t sleep much Wednesday night.  But the room was comfortable, and we had a nice view of the foliage around the hotel from our window.  Everything in the hotel seemed excruciatingly modern (I still prefer room keys as opposed to the cards they hand out these days!), right down to the elevators requiring the use of our key card!  Predictably, the door leading to our corridor from the elevators decided to malfunction (!) causing us to make trips down to the front-desk for help to get back into our room!  Finally, the front-desk got tired of letting guests in and resorted to some duct tape (!) to keep that door unlatched.

We ended up going to breakfast around 7:30am on Thursday.  We were treated to quite a spread and immediately got the impression we were in some place with a colonial heritage.  The baked beans gave it away!  This was our first taste of Kenyan fruit, and we were amazed at the spread – juicy watermelon, papaya, passion fruit etc. adorned a table against the wall – and how wonderful everything tasted.  After a satisfying breakfast, we headed off to the front-desk to meet up with John – Benson had arranged for John to take us around Nairobi for the day.  John drove up in a rickety looking Toyota and we were off.

As we drove through the suburbs of Nairobi, I was struck by the contrast between the greenery in some, and the industrial character and accompanying dust in other neighborhoods.  We first drove to the National Museum – about a 20-minute drive from the hotel.  Traffic was awful, bumper-to-bumper everywhere with short respites every now-and-then. 2-wheelers weaved their way around cars and 4x4s causing more chaos. At the museum, we purchased tickets for the day and spent about 90 minutes going through the exhibits.

The museum is primarily focused on Natural History but it also documents Kenyan history, art and culture.  Pretty soon we found ourselves in the section for East African birds.  I was amazed at the sheer diversity of species on display – room after room, shelf after shelf contained painstakingly cataloged stuffed birds.  Another room focused on Kenyan history and the history of the lone railroad built mainly by imported Indian labor, back in the late 19^th century.  Yet another room focused on paleoanthropology, a subject that has interested me since I was 10 years old.  Some of the exhibits in this section were perhaps slightly biased with speculation about how humankind may have begun in Kenya, as opposed to Tanzania or Ethiopia.  While certainly possible, there are many sites in Eastern Africa and some as far south as Botswana that are possible candidates – the exhibits did point these out.  But I felt that the bias (subtle) was entirely forgivable – the museum is high-quality, and it is well worth spending a morning viewing the exhibits.

Later, we walked over to the adjoining snake park and spent a half hour seeing various local species.  The black mambas were particularly impressive – the park had about 5 of these deadly specimens in a glass enclosure.

We then walked over to a concession/restaurant in the museum-snake park complex to quench our thirst with some soft drinks (it was particularly warm that day, probably about 85 Fahrenheit, but the equatorial sun beats down on you with an intensity not felt in northern latitudes!).

Post our trip to the museum, we decided to visit the Giraffe Center in the south of Nairobi, about a 45-minute drive from the museum.  This is set-up such that one picks up some grass feed and molasses in pellet form, walks along a raised catwalk and waits for the giraffes to come right up to you.  You then feed them!  They literally stick out their tongues and you place a pellet or two on it.  Amazing!  The giraffes each have their own unique character – some are more aggressive, while others are more placid.  We spent a half hour or so at the Center, and then headed to a mall to grab a late lunch and to pick up some cash in Kenyan Shillings, the local currency.

Lunch was pleasant – we ate at a restaurant called Art Caffe in the Galleria mall.  I had my first Tusker Beer (I had seen so many commercials for this, and was keen on giving it a try, both on YouTube and in Kenya). It tasted very much like a London Pilsner, refreshing and crisp!

Once done with lunch, we went to the local supermarket named Carrefour to pick up some essentials.  Then, we headed back to the Sarova as it was already about 4pm and we had to pack for the first leg of the Safari that was to begin the next morning.

We spent the evening back at the hotel rearranging and repacking our gear for the next few days.  We had far more luggage than the 15kg/33 pounds permitted on the various domestic flights to and from the airstrips for the various camps we were visiting.  We had planned to store our suitcases with Gamewatchers in Nairobi for the first few days and had planned on having Gamewatchers deliver it to us for the portion of our Safari that involved road transport.  Out came the duffel bags and soon we were done.  Dinner was a quiet affair at the hotel’s restaurant.  We arranged for an early breakfast the next day since we had to leave by 0630 to catch our flight to Amboseli.  With that, we were off to bed relatively early.

I should add that by now we had picked up a smattering of Swahili.  Our vocabulary now included: Jambo (Hello); Asante Sana (Thank you very much); Karibu Sana (You are very welcome)!

Random Tidbits:

• Getting there: Kenya Airways operates direct flights from the US (New York-JFK, Boston etc.) to Nairobi! Flight time is about 14 hours. If (when!) I go again, I might look into that.
• Food & Dietary restrictions: You can arrange this with your in-country travel arranger. Even in camps far from what we call civilization, this is a non-issue.
• Vaccines: A few weeks before heading out for the trip, we visited an Infectious Diseases doctor in NJ who advised us on country-specific vaccinations and prophylactics. Yellow fever, Typhoid, Malaria pills etc. were on the list. The risk of contracting these is low but we felt much safer and protected with these – the peace of mind was well worth it.
• Sightseeing in Nairobi: We did not see the Karen Blixen museum (from the movie Out of Africa) though we did go to Crescent Island on Lake Naivasha later in the trip. In addition, there is an Elephant Orphanage in Nairobi that we sadly missed. To visit, you need to book in advance. Nairobi is one of the few major cities (probably the only one) around the world that have a national park right in the city. To visit, we’d have had to set aside a full day and we decided not to. But, you may choose otherwise.
• Money & Banking: A US Dollar is about 115 shillings today (March 31). I withdrew some cash at an ATM in Nairobi, but realized later in the trip that it wasn’t sufficient and had to ask our guide to stop off at Naivasha (the town) to find another ATM. As long as you have prepaid everything for your trip, you need cash for small incidentals and tipping. The ATM in Nairobi charged me 7 USD in fees for a $200 withdrawal. If you decide to tip in USD, keep in mind that bills prior to 2012 cannot be exchanged in Kenya. Tipping is a whole other subject that I may cover in a subsequent blog.

All in all, I felt it was a good first day “in-country” getting acclimated to place, people and culture. I felt a lot more prepared to head out the next day for the true beginning of our Safari!

To be continued…