Advertisement
Published: August 31st 2008
So, I’ve made it to the end of day 2 without seeing or hearing from VSO - and I haven’t panicked yet!
Another VSO couple, Mark and Lucy, and I arrived at the Methodist Guest House Friday night after a pretty smooth trip from Heathrow to Nairobi and a quick pick up by Peter, a taxi driver who does a lot of work for VSO. I’d love to write some witty observations about the decor and service, but I was so tired I can barely remember arriving. I think I just smiled and nodded a lot.
We were hopeful about hearing from someone on Saturday about the plan until Wednesday (when we’re booked to be here until) but no joy. But by the end of the day we had given up and were accepting the
pole, pole (slowly, slowly) attitude. Don’t think it was a wasted day though - we managed to buy some Safaricom sim cards with which it seems we can text, call some people, but can’t receive either texts or calls. 3 calls to customer services later and still no joy. Hopefully we’ll get something sorted tomorrow. I also managed to meet the resident cat and
her kitten who are both extremely cute. A Puerto Rican Lutheran clergyman (who we later discovered is called Mario) told us he had christened the cat Missouri (no idea why) and gave it milk from his coffee. They seem to spend all their time outside the dining room looking incredibly cute.
After a strenuous round of lunch, dinner and lots of tea we ended the day with a round of shithead which is going to have to be renamed so as not to offend the many earnest Americans who asked us what we were playing. Mario joined us and we played for a few hours before bed and a catch up on world news with Al Jazeera.
Today was quite a lot more exciting. We assumed VSO wouldn’t be coming around so we called Peter early and arranged to go out to visit some orphaned elephants and a giraffe centre, followed by a wildlife walk. It was so nice to get outside of the Methodist Centre and see what Nairobi really looks like. There is a restaurant called Carnivore that sells lots of game meat on the way to the Nairobi National Park - intriguing. He brought his
son and daughter with him and she was excellent in helping us with the Swahili names for the animals. The elephants were so sweet - playing in the mud and play fighting. They came close to the rope separating us from them and walked in to the crowd, sliming a few unfortunates with mud as they passed. They are all rescued orphan infants (under 2 years) who will stay in the nursery until they’re ready to go to Tsavo National Park to be with the other children and teenagers who have already made the move. Giraffe Manor was equally informative but loads of fun. We were able to feed the giraffes by putting the food pellets on their tongues but drew the line at putting the pellets between our lips and getting a wet kiss from them.
Finally we headed off for some food and a walk around the fenced in bit of the NP and saw some big cats and pygmy hippos, etc. All good but very tiring at this point. I was pretty happy to head home for a shower and some time to relax (and write this). I expect VSO will get here tomorrow and we
will do some language training or administration or something. Hopefully they’ll help get the phones sorted too and then communications systems will be properly up before heading off to the coast on Wednesday.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.067s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 12; qc: 31; dbt: 0.0365s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Alexandra Lamb Guevara
non-member comment
... a world away...
Babe - I can't quite believe that last week you were sitting at the Coach House in Brighton and now you're taking photos of orphaned elephants! Quite surreal..... enjoy enjoy. xxx