Location: Nairobi, Kenya

I woke up at like 6 AM and couldn’t go back to sleep because I was TOO excited about meeting new safari tour friends today!! Even though I knew it was going to be a bit of a ‘hurry up and wait’ kind of day I love meeting people on trips and just have a good feeling about this. We cleaned up the apartment and checked out to head over to our new fancy pantsy hotel, The Heron.

When we booked the safari Pauline and I requested to be roomed together if sharing spaces was required, which turned out to be a little bit scandalous when we tried to check in at the hotel. Two women sharing a room? The horrors. We briefly debated telling people we are sisters but we look absolutely nothing alike and figured that might seem extra suspicious… so from here on out Pauline and I are now cousins. Is that less suspicious???

We weren’t meeting up with our group members until later in the evening so we posted up at the hotel café to pass some time. We ordered coffees and snacks on rotation for hours while we chatted and I taught Pauline to play crib. Once we kind of realized we had a like a whole day to wait, we booked tickets to walk through an animal preserve nearby, like a mini safari! The spaces they had for the animals were massive and sometimes contained multiple species. All the animals looked really well taken care of and it reminded me a lot of the wildlife preserve back home, just with zebras and cheetahs and rhinos instead of moose and bears. There is a permanent resident giraffe and the keepers let us into her pen to pet and feed her and I was even more shocked than a few days ago when we were feeding them from a platform. This giraffe was like walking over top of us! Is this real life?! We had such an awesome time walking the loop that we actually walked it twice! It was a perfect way to while away the hours before meeting our group!

Suddenly the time had arrived so we quickly taxied back to the hotel and were being introduced to about 8 other travellers who we will be spending the next 9 days with! We have a few other Canadians, a couple of American ladies, a German guy, a pair of Swiss sisters, and an English woman! A few others are arriving very late tonight and if they’re anything like the people we have met so far I think it’s going to be wonderful. We all had dinner together at the hotel restaurant and conversation flowed easily and lasted for hours. I am so pleased that everyone seems really lovely – it bodes very well for the trip to have such a great group.

We are all starting a very long travel day tomorrow at ass o’clock, so I crawled into bed to write and am trying to keep my eyes open juuuuust long enough to get this all down. I am a bit sad to be leaving Nairobi so quickly, now that I feel like we’ve finally gotten a decent handle on it. I am also very excited to be heading across the border tomorrow…

Here’s to new friends and new countries!

Sav

P.S. too many good animal photos today so here’s a couple more!