Kenya

On January 16, I woke up very excited to go to the airport. I was flying to Nairobi from the Newark Liberty International Airport, and my mom was kind enough to work a half day to make the two hour drive to drop me off. My flight out was a little after 7pm, so we got on the road in the mid-afternoon.

The first leg of my trip was from Newark to Zurich, and then Zurich to Nairobi. I got through security pretty quickly and grabbed something to eat while I waited for my flight to start boarding--and that's when the trouble started. The plane that was leaving before mine from the same gate was having technical difficulties and was unable to be moved. My plane was fine but there were no empty gates immediately available, so that's when the delays started. First, it was only 20 minutes, then it was 30, then 45, then an hour. I had a little more than an hour and a half between when my first flight landed and when my second flight took off, so I asked one of the flight attendants before we boarded if she thought I would make my second flight, and she assured me I would. Unfortunately, we got delayed several more times, even after boarding, and I landed in Zurich about an hour after my connecting flight had already left.

The airline had rebooked me on a flight to Istanbul and then on to Nairobi, so I hustled through the Zurich airport to make that flight to Istanbul, only to discover boarding had already closed by the time I got there. I finally ended up rebooking on a ridiculous flight schedule: Zurich to Geneva, Geneva to Istanbul, Istanbul to Nairobi. One short layover had turned into four flights to get where I was going and an added travel time of more than 8 hours. The other minor issue is that I had booked an airport transfer to my hotel, so I needed to get in touch with the company to let them know I had been delayed (And I felt terrible for the person who was supposed to pick me up at the airport because my new schedule had me landing at 3am). There was no time to do it in Zurich, and the Geneva airport didn't have easily accessible WiFi like we do here in US airports, of course. Long story short, I had to scan my boarding pass into a machine to print out a WiFi voucher before I could actually connect. However, I was able to get in touch with the airport transfer people, and they also reached out to my hotel to let them know I got delayed and not to give my room away (which I hadn't even thought of). Once I was able to breathe a sigh of relief that I'd contacted them, the last two legs of my trip to Nairobi were uneventful, thank God.

Flying over the Swiss alps

Landing in Nairobi and getting my on-site tourist visa were also blessedly uneventful, and I was so glad to see that my checked bag had somehow not gotten lost in my crazy marathon trip to Kenya. My airport transfer driver was waiting for me outside and she took me to my hotel, where I was absolutely thrilled to take a shower and a short nap, because I had a full day in Nairobi planned.

In the morning (as in, about 3 hours later), I had breakfast at the hotel and then met my local tour guide. He was taking me to see the sights of Nairobi, and our first stop was the Giraffe Center, a home for the endangered Rothschild giraffe. We had the opportunity to feed and interact with the giraffes, which was just as much fun as it sounds.

The Giraffe Center is also where I saw my first warthog, but certainly not my last. Warthogs and baboons were everywhere in Nairobi, just on the side of the highways and in people's yards.

Our next stop was the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust's elephant orphanage. We got to see the elephant handlers feeding the babies. None of them came close enough for me to touch them, which was admittedly kind of a let down, but it was still a magical experience.

The tour continued at the Kazuri bead factory, a business that employs more than 300 single mothers in making beautiful handcrafted ceramic beads. Each piece of jewelry, from molding, glazing, firing, and assembling, takes three days to make. I bought two bracelets: one for me, one for my mom.

The last stop on the tour was the Bomas of Kenya, a tourist village that recreates traditional villages of a number of Kenyan tribes. Forgive me that I didn't think to take photos, but the villages were really interesting, and I also got to see some traditional dances.

It was late afternoon by now, so the tour guide dropped me back at my hotel and I took another nap before I met up with my tour group for the pre-departure meeting. I was joining a 43 day camping tour of Africa that left Nairobi the next day, and I got to meet some of my fellow travelers at the meeting, some of whom ended up becoming great friends of mine.

The next day, my first day of the tour, I got to meet the rest of the tour group. I and the people at the meeting the night before were joining a group that had been traveling together for about two weeks, starting in Nairobi and touring through Uganda to hike into the mountains to see gorillas before looping back to Nairobi to continue south. That day, we traveled from Nairobi to the Maasai Mara National Reserve, which is essentially the Kenyan side of Serengeti National Park in Tanzania; it's the same piece of land, separated into two by the border between the two countries. On the way to the Maasai Mara, we drove along the Great Rift Valley, and the views were incredible.

Great Rift Valley

Traveling to the edge of the reserve took about 6 hours, and getting used to the roads outside of Nairobi was an adjustment. Nairobi was crazy in its own way because traffic laws seemed almost nonexistent, but all the roads were paved; once we left the city, the same could not be said of the roads leading to and within the Maasai Mara. In fact, the road to our campsite (which was more like glamping, with permanent pre-erected tents and beds, so they were really easing us in) was a process even for our 4x4 safari vehicles to traverse, but we made it. That evening, we did our first game drive in the Maasai Mara, and it was such a thrill to see the animals in the wild, especially because we got really close to elephants.

A jackal on the side of the road

The next day was a full day of game drives, and we were lucky enough to see not only more elephants but also two lions, fairly close up, and lots of antelope/gazelle. The wildlife viewing on this trip was certainly off to an amazing start.

As amazing as the lions were (believe me, when I took the photo above, I was barely holding it together), the highlight of that day was seeing a group of cheetahs hunting an antelope. The antelope got away but it still felt like I had been transported into a National Geographic special.

After a full day of amazing wildlife viewing, our tour group visited a Maasai village, a tribe local to the Maasai Mara. The Maasai culture was really interesting to learn about because they have a polygamist society and also their diet is very unique. They eat strictly animal meat, blood, and milk (I double checked with a local that they really don't eat any vegetables? And he said no, they don't). They aren't able to farm because they live within the boundaries of the Maasai Mara reserve and the wild animals are so destructive. Tourists visiting them and buying their wares keep them afloat and help them send their children to school.

As for their work, women build the houses (from cow dung) and do most of the work, including raising the children and caring for the animals, while the men protect the village from the wild animals. Here's an interesting tidbit: back in the day, before wildlife conservation was valued so highly, Maasai men had to kill a lion in order to be deemed worthy of a wife. Since they can be married up to four times, some Maasai men killed four lions single-handedly. Hard to imagine, to say the least. The tribe was very welcoming to us. They performed some of their traditional songs and dances for us, and also held one of their traditional jumping competitions, inviting us to participate (Unsurprisingly, I declined). We also got to tour the inside of their homes.

The inside of their homes, as you can see above, is quite small. I'm only 5'5 and I had to duck to get inside. But there is space for cooking and sleeping spaces for the wife and their children, so what more do you need?

Our last stop in the village was a visit to the blacksmith. He makes jewelry to sell and weapons for the warriors.

We spent the night back at our glamping site and traveled back to Nairobi in the following day. We weren't staying at the hotel in Nairobi that night; we were staying at a campsite this time, so we got a crash course in pitching our tents and rolling out our (very thin) mattresses. We were leaving the next day for Tanzania, which was hard to believe, but we spent some time at the campsite bar and got to know each other a little better. Our time in Kenya was relatively short, but we managed to squeeze a lot in, especially since we had seen three of the big five (elephant, lion, rhino, cape buffalo, leopard) already in the first few days. I was excited to see what Tanzania had in store.