The Giraffe Manor is basically a small hotel. It used to be a very large house and was originally owned by the MacIntyre family (the makers of toffee) then sold to Jock and Leslie Melville. In 1976, Jock and Leslie Melville made a plight to save the Rothschild giraffe by rescuing a couple giraffes from the wild and raising them on their 140 acres of land. Today, due in large part to their breeding and releasing program, the Rothschild giraffe population has gone from a population in the 70's to a population in the hundreds.
Okay, so that is where we are. Now for the fun part. The Manor currently has 9 giraffes. Although they are wild, they really enjoy being fed pellets by people...And we have really enjoyed feeding them!
This is Gaye kissing Lynne.
Tomorrow we visit the David Sheldrick Elephant Sanctuary. We will go at 11a.m. to watch them get fed. We will adopt a baby elephant, then come back at 5p.m. to put her to bed in her stall. The elephant sanctuary staff pick up orphaned elephants from all over Kenya. They bring them back to the orphanage and care for them until they are old enough to fend for themselves in the wild.
I would strongly recommend staying here if you are ever in Nairobi. It is the most relaxing, welcoming environment imaginable. The hosts are amazing and the giraffes as you can see are quite welcoming as well!
My goal for this trip is 20,000 images. For me it is a numbers game. I will take advantage of as many good picture opportunities as I can. The more I take, the better my chances of some good pictures. At the end of the trip, if I take 20,000 images, I should have about 2-5 stunning pictures, 20 great shots and maybe 200 pictures that are pretty good. 1181 pictures today. I missed my mark by 719 pictures, but tomorrow is another day... 18,819 pictures to go.
And here we are in Kenya safe and sound...This first day's journal might be a bit boring. Okay, let's call it what it is. It is boring, but I promise I will try to write some interesting stuff here and there and hopefully upload some interesting pictures along the way. For now, I am using this blog as somewhat of a journal, so I can look back on it in the future. I will also be posting my pictures to my websites (eventually). Including my Africa site and my main site as well as on my photography facebook site.
Gaye and I arrived in Kenya safe and sound with not so much as a hiccup. It was amazing really, I have never traveled this far before without even so much as an incident of any sort. No flights were delayed, we weren't late or rushing anywhere, nor were our lay-overs very long between flights. We didn't even have to travel far between gates and we always seemed to be landing in the hanger near where we were departing from. We both slept well on the flights and landed in Kenya actually feeling somewhat re-freshed and energetic considering the fact that we had just traveled 29 hours to this point. My only annoyance was our first Swiss airline flight had a screwy inflight tv system that didn't work very well. That is extremely minor when you are travelling with overweight, oversized bags that the airlines don't like me to travel with that I insist must be carry-on bags. When we arrived in Kenya it was 6p.m. and we had a short line up to pick up our visa's (which cost half as much as if we had mailed in our passports like we were supposed to. I refused to mail ours away. The last time I did that, our passports came back a day late, making us change our tickets and leave a day late, thus messing up the first part of our trip.) The line up for the visa was short and everyone else had to go through another line up to show their passport anyway, so in the end, it didn't cost us any time and we saved over $100 US.
A representative from our first hotel (The Fairview Hotel) was waiting for us at the airport and took us to the hotel. Unfortunately the president flew in today apparently, so there was a huge traffic jam and what should have been a 15-20 minute taxi ride took us an hour. We were bumper to bumper for most of the way. Vehicles were agressively jockying for a better position in line and all the while 50 or 60 men and boys were walking between the cars trying to sell their goods. They were selling everything from bags of peanuts, huge blueberries, oranges, limes, hats, pants, posters, to DVD's and pornography.
The hotel room here at The Fairview is nice, but plain, but the grounds are spectacular! I can't wait to see them in the morning. They have an absolutley beautiful and huge water feature. The grounds of this place are stunning. It is definitely an oasis in the middle of a large city. Nairobi has a population of four million. It is really decieving. As you fly in, the airport looks like an old small airport in an old town. It is unique looking, but certainly doesn't look like it is a major airport that supports such a large city.
Tomorrow we get picked up by a representative of Giraffe Manor at 10:30. Our agenda for tomorrow theoretically is a visit to the giraffe centre, The David Sheldrick elephant sanctuary and lots of sleep if need be. Oddly enough, I am actually kind of tired, so I may sleep well which would be a miracle. Usually the jet lag really sets in for the first couple of days after such intense traveling.
20,000 images is the goal. Tomorrow, it begins. I need to take 2000 pictures tomorrow...
