Hey folks – Jamie has taken up the notebook and put together our latest update – enjoy!
After making contact with the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington, DC and receiving the green light to send our passports there for visas, we thought we were home free. We heard that DHL provided a visa service “all the time” for other overlanders. We thought that we would simply tell DHL when the passports were ready to be picked up and they would pick up the passports. A few days after the passports arrived in Washington D.C. we called to make sure everything was in order and the Ethiopian Embassy informed us that the passports would be ready to be picked up on Thursday. Great! On Thursday we went to DHL and told them that the passports were ready to be picked up. That was when we had the first clue that this final leg of the process was not going to be as easy as we had hoped. DHL wanted reference numbers that would have to be obtained from the Ethiopian Embassy. We wanted the passports to start their journey back as soon as possible and we knew that getting a reference number meant another phone call. The Ethiopian Embassy in Washington does not make it a regular practice to pick up a ringing phone nor do they respond to their emails so we considered ourselves lucky to get that Thursday pick-up communication. After two nights up till midnight trying to call the embassy, we informed the DHL staff here in Kenya that we couldn’t get those numbers and that in our experience, they wouldn’t be able to contact the embassy staff, but we needed the passports picked up. Each day that passed we told DHL to pick up the passports, but they wouldn’t do it without calling the embassy first. Since the Ethiopian embassy never pick up the phone, our passports were never picked up and the Ethiopian embassy sent them off to my Mom’s house in California, where we’d had the visa payment sent from since we couldn’t courier cash and no bank here in Nairobi would give us a cashiers check and none of the Western Unions offices would provide a money order. Now we had to get DHL Kenya to contact the DHL in Sacramento to let my Mom ship our passports back to us in Nairobi. We got that handled but then had the worry that since the passports were no longer arriving from an embassy, they may be held up in customs.
Officially grounded in Kenya while our passports were globetrotting without us, we were forced to slow down and check out Nairobi and the surrounding areas a bit. The first must do was to have dinner with one of my school friends, Sarah. Sarah prepared a delicious dinner and she and her husband Imran provided us Kenya travel tips. On Sarah and Imran’s advice, we headed to Lake Naivasha and Hell’s Gate National Park. Lake Navaisha is one of the Rift Valley lakes and to get to it we, um Dyna Rae, first had to climb to the top of the massive valley escarpment.
Near the top of our climb Dyna Rae became asthmatic and the weather turned cold and rainy. We stopped in a pine forest to add a couple layers and let Dyna have a rest. When Dyna Rae started playing hide and seek we knew it was time to go.
Once we started the descent, the weather cleared and Dyna was herself again. We made our way to Fisherman’s Camp and were struck by the feel of the camp. Until now, most other campers we’ve met were travelers, but this camp was full of Kenyan families and even a youth group. We were surrounded by loads of friendly Kenyans who didn’t see us as oddities or walking cash machines.
The place was full of animals. There were vervet monkeys who acted like street kids – mostly tumbling through the trees and with each other but always on the lookout for some unattended food morsels. Any food an arms length away was vulnerable to these critters. Then there were Black-and-white colobus monkeys, Egyptian geese, hippopotamuses, and most noticeably the huge storks. We first noticed these giant storks in Nairobi and were amazed that such big birds were so abundant in a big city. Then we arrived at Fisherman’s Camp and these birds were everywhere. Where the vervets would steal our food, the storks would take anything they could carry in their beaks including a plastic baggy containing Gary’s spork.
Hell’s Gate National Park was one of the main attractions of this little adventure. We were allowed to ride bicycles right into the park without a guide. Nearly every other National Park won’t even allow a motorbike. We hired some bikes at Fisherman’s Camp rode 5k to the park and another 6k in the park surrounded by warthogs, zebra, and buffalo.
Once deep into the park, we dismounted our bikes and had a wander around the sinuous Lower Gorge Canyon.
When you are promised hot springs sometimes it is just a hot spring. There was no soaking here.
And we finished off with a bike ride home.
Back in Nairobi, and still waiting for our passports so we managed to fill the time with cuddly wildlife.
Baby elephants!! The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, located just a couple miles from our Nairobi home, takes in orphaned baby elephants and raises them to the age of three. At three years the elephants are weaned and moved to another facility in a national park to be reintroduced to the wild.
The youngest baby elephants are fed milk on demand day or night. The older elephants receive milk approximately every 3 hours.
Young Rothschild Giraffes!! The Giraffe Center, just around the corner from our place in Nairobi, was started in 1979 to help pull the Rothschild Giraffes from the brink of extinction. Here we were allowed to feed the giraffes food pellets. The giraffes would allow us to pet them or even kiss them as long as we had food pellets. We made momentary fickle friendships.
Local, wild warthogs decided to join the party. I hear a giraffe center is a great place to raise your young.
Finally, since reminders of the Danish Author Karen Blixen have been everywhere since we entered Kenya from the Karen Blixen Café in Malindi Bay to the Karen District we have been staying in since we arrived in Nairobi, we watched the film “Out of Africa” and then paid a visit to Karen Blixen’s historic home where her famous novel was set.
Our stay in Nairobi has been better than we had hoped but the fancy malls, fancy coffee shops, light-speed internet, and daily hot showers are starting to wear on us. We are ready to hit the road and meet our next challenges.