Child’s play: Easy adventures in the safari capital
Just inside Nairobi National Park – in the red dirt and quiet hour of nearly-noon in wild places – our daughter Tula stands enchanted in the company of an elephant named Sana Sana.
The elephant, herself a toddler, is so close we run fingers over her paper-crinkle skin. We count her eyelashes and puffs of dust from her footsteps stain our socks earth-red too.
“Her name means ‘very much’ in Kiswahili,” says one of her keepers. “Because she took very much effort to rescue.”
We’d come to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an elephant orphanage just 7kms from the city centre, to show our 18-month-old the great African animals from her picture books.
Nowhere, we’d been told, can you meet them so easily and so naturally as you can in Nairobi: The Safari Capital.
And so it was that morning as we watched baby elephant after baby elephant – 22 in total – come trotting and trumpeting from the bushes for their brunch milk. Tula squealed with excitement as they slurped formula from elephant-sized bottles held high with curled trunks, before the keeper made introductions.
“This one is Maisha, meaning life. And here is Jotto, named after the heat of the drought he was plucked from.”
On hearing their stories, bittersweet triumphs among hundreds at the orphanage, ‘very much effort’ seemed a gross understatement.
Sana Sana’s had begun in northern Kenya two years before. She was found wandering alone near a conservation camp: An emaciated baby without her mother’s milk and with a tail mauled by hyena. Locals say she’d sought company at the camp for more than a week; sleeping beside their tents each night – before the decision was made to airlift her to the capital. It’s not known what happened to her family but like most of the orphans, they’d probably been killed by poachers.
“The babies need much time to grieve their loved ones,” we’re told. “Of course, being elephants, they’ll never be able to forget – but, with a lot of love, they do get better.”
The orphans will spend 8-10 years with the Trust before they’re released back to the wild with a new herd. For the moment though, they’re busy charming a class of local school children pressed shoulder-to-shoulder along a slack rope fence.
And our Tula, too small to understand human malice, poverty or the pressing sweat of conservation, delights in their antics as they flop into mud; one on top of another, ears flapping and trunks tossing dust with infectious joie de vivre.
As we make to leave, a family of warthog zigzag from the scrub to sink into water too, tails in the air like antennas to mud – and the keeper tells us that their name ‘Pumba’ means silly or foolish.
***
Foolish. Something we initially thought a family trip to Nairobi could be. Of course we’d heard much of the city’s crime: Of ‘Nai-robbery’ and the terror threat, the infamous sprawl of the Kibera slum and the notoriously perilous matatu buses. My husband and I had visited before and it wasn’t a natural choice for a getaway with toddler-in-tow.
This time, we were on a quick visa renewal run from our temporary home of neighbouring Ethiopia. We’ll just get it done, we’d figured, instead of anticipating how easy and actually refreshing these few days could get.
***
From elephants, our toddler safari had us driving around the park – which takes up close to a fifth of the city – to a centre where we’d heard you could kiss a giraffe.
Established almost forty years ago in a bid to save Kenya’s few remaining Rothschild’s Giraffe, the centre is now run by the African Fund for Endangered Wildlife, with all entrance fees going towards conservation. Attached to the Instagram-famous Giraffe Manor, it’s become a popular tourist stop with a semi-resident herd of 10 giants.
Tula spies them before we do and she runs, arms whirling as if to catch a butterfly: ‘Hellooooooo Giraffe’!
“This one doesn’t much like kids,” we’re warned, and we whisk her to a tree-high observation platform to meet a friendlier pair at eye level.There, on Daddy’s shoulder, she sat transfixed: Absorbed in their dreamy gambol towards us, in their leopard-gold fur, in every tongue lick and long neck curl for a pellet of food.
‘Big,’ she says. And I realize – holding out her hand to feel the muzzle of a wild thing – how rarely we stop to wonder at it all.
Tula was just as taken by a kind man, sitting in the shade, fashioning tiny, tropical birds with a piece of blonde wood and a hand axe. So we forewent the nearby forest walk to sit and watch him for a while too.Under the acacia there we admitted for the first time that maybe we weren’t doing this parenting thing so badly after all.
It had been a trying year: Negotiating life as a new family; in a country that is his but not mine; and in a house which, for the best part of it, had been without running water. In need of this down time, we happily adopted the slower pace of our daughter’s discoveries before leaving with three pretty painted birds – one each.
***
By late afternoon, we were watching bearded monkeys tussle in the jacaranda trees and the wind through a skylight above a carved-wood bed. ‘Tumbili!’ Tula had learned their local name – and how apt, I think, as they tumble above us.
We’d booked an AirBnB pool house in Karen, the lush outer suburb of Nairobi’s colonial mansions, tea estate families and city elite. It was an oasis, made for romantics – but it was also a small child’s wonderland.
From the pool chairs on our terracotta patio, cocooned by mango, olive and old trees on the edge of the Ngong forest, we understood why they also call Nairobi ‘The Green City in The Sun.’
The air was warm, humming with insects and hawking with large birds. Frangipani and palm fronds wept over the pool as we sat for a self-styled dinner of prosciutto and goat cheese, snapper and sweet fruits.
As it cooled and after putting Tuli to sleep, we opened a bottle of Malbec and lit candles by a fire in the lounge. We turned out the lights to sit in the glow and talk about maybe living in Kenya one month of the year. What lux peace. What a pool house. What a world away from home.
***
For our last night we’d booked a room at the Hilton Hotel in the middle of town. Partly because we knew where it was and partly because of sentimental memories of being there with my father, many years before, enjoying a buffet breakfast with what we swore were the best cups of coffee of our lives.
The hotel itself; with savannah cream walls, crystal chandeliers, antique suitcases and air balloon baskets garnishing the lobby – was all old world, expedition charm.
Though there was little charm about Nairobi when it began its life as a halfway camp along the Mombasa to Uganda railway; its foundations sunk, as they were, into a plague-riddled swamp. In the 1920s, the city was described by one colonial officer as ‘a slatternly creature, unfit to queen it over so lovely a country.’
But the Hilton was built just a few years after Kenya’s independence, when the city sprung out of the bog to grow into a cosmopolitan hub of East Africa. The hotel became, and still is, an iconic launchpad for safari-seekers into the African bush and amidst their to-ings and fro-ings, we enjoyed incredible comfort, service and what we were happy to find was still a sumptuous breakfast with very fine coffee.
If we’d been there on a Saturday, we could have strolled up Mama Ngina Street to the colourful Maasai Markets – and if we’d had more time, we could have visited the National Museum and its botanic gardens with a 5-minute taxi ride. But the day was Friday, the hour was late and we were hungry.
Instead of a hotel dinner, we take off on foot to one of the city’s best-loved traditional food joints.
“You must be real locals if you know Ranalos?” the doorman had nodded. “Just don’t give papaya!”
We tell him we’re not so local that we understand Sheng, Nairobi’s ever-evolving street language, and he explains how he meant: ‘Don’t flash your valuables along the way!’
From the bustle of downtown, we make it up a few flights of stairs to a hall with an open kitchen and ordered ugali (maize), coconut fish, fried chicken and kunde greens from a woman in a hole in the wall. We take seats on a sunny rooftop gazebo with Tusker beer, sugarcane juice and the best of Kenyan rhumba.
And we dance: Tula around the patio with all her innate child’s rhythm. I with her, embracing the liberty of being around strangers – until the food arrives: fresh, spiced and hearty. We linger, licking fingers, but leave before it gets too dark to walk through the CBD with its dusk hustlers, quasi tour guide hawkers, exchange merchants and blasting matatu buses.
“They bang like crazy,” our driver Joe had said, adding that people will ‘pimp’ a matatu with sound systems and paint jobs for at least double their worth. “Even the President told them to keep up the noise because the music is so good.”
Stuck in traffic on the way to the airport the next afternoon, one bounces around us and over the footpath like a spooked antelope. ‘Twisted Kerb’ scrawled in graffiti across its side; ‘Luminous Rasta’ over the back window.
But we’re preoccupied with a dead buffalo. The freeway runs a length around the other side of the national park and from the car windows we could see a bloated beast, on its back with four stiff legs to the sky.
“I passed that fellow two days before,” says Joe. “There must be too much food if they haven’t finished him off yet.” It’s common, he says, to see lions prowl roadside too.
By now, Tula’s attention was on a herd of rust-metal elephant sculptures marking the entrance to the airport – and we’re grateful we’ve left the predators for another journey.
Our next visa run perhaps; one we’ll absolutely look forward to.
Because if great travel involves adventure and childlike wonder -and that easy peace which comes with being absorbed in what’s in front of us and nothing else – then a moment with a toddler and a baby elephant; or under acacia and a giraffe’s gaze; or dancing rhumba with coconut fish fresh on our lips in the middle of town – is what it surely looks like.
If it also offers a couple of tired new parents a chance to reconnect in the shade … well, asante sana sana – thank you very, very much Nairobi.
EASY ADVENTURES
Meet baby elephants, and maybe adopt one at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi National Park. Arrive at 11am for the elephants’ breakfast and daily mud bath.
Kiss a giraffe at the Giraffe Centre, Karen. Go early to miss the crowds or go quickly after the elephants. There is also a nature walk at the centre through the Gogo River Bird Sanctuary.
Try authentic Kenyan at K’Osewe Ranalo foods. Order Nyama Choma, Kenya’s famous BBQ’d meats – or go for their coconut fish stew and chapatti. On Kimathi road, opposite Java House, CBD.
OTHER THINGS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN IN NAIROBI
Escape the city: Both the Ololua Forest in Karen and the Karura Forest on Limuru Rd offer family-friendly hiking trails with waterfalls, butterflies and monkeys, beautiful rivers and picnic spots. At Karura Forest you can also hire bikes to cycle the trails and enjoy a meal at the picturesque River Cafe.
Nairobi National Museum, Kipande Road. The museum is set in some beautiful botanic gardens, also great for family picnics.
Nairobi Safari Walk on Langata Road. See rare animals like Albino Zebra and the white rhino, among others, from a raised forest walkway.
Visit the Kiambethu Tea Farm, Limuru, a one-hour-drive from the city, for a delicious lunch, guided plantation and forest walk with Colobus monkey and other wildlife.
Wander the colourful Maasai Markets. They moonlight at different locations through the week. Check local sites for details and be sure to bargain.
