On safari in Amboseli

Coyle and I headed out of Nairobi yesterday to head to Amboseli National Park about 240 km away. Amboseli is not as famous as Maasai Mara park but I chose it for a couple or reasons and it has not disappointed. Amboseli is smaller, easier to drive to from Nairobi (I was not taking one of those tiny planes to get here 😂) and because of its predicable water sources the animal behavior is predictable so you’re not driving for hours and not seeing anything. We have seen so many animals and Coyle is having a blast. Finally, I chose Amboseli because I love mountains and the park is at the base of Mt Kilimanjaro. I knew that in the dry winter months in Kenya (which is what they are in now) the mountain is often obscured by cloud cover but we have been lucky enough to see the snow covered peek on both days. Even with all these game drives we still have time for Coyle’s new favorite activity, relaxing around the pool and playing with our local neighborhood naughty monkeys. Mr Snuggles, the worlds most well travelled teddy bear also got in on the game viewing excitement.  Now I will proceed to overload you with pictures because you can’t have a safari without pictures!

Benin monkeys, beads and bomas oh my

We had an incredibly busy and great day exploring Nairobi today. The morning started at the Nairobi animal orphanage. Nairobi has a game park outside the city and part of the mission of the park is to provide varying levels of support to animals in need. The animal orphanage houses animals that are often unable to be returned to the wild and need significant support. Many of them, like the Benin monkey Coyle loved taking pictures of, were rescued from luggage as they were being trafficked. The orphanage was a little too zoo like for me but Coyle loved it.

Next we headed to another part of the park for a walking safari. These animals can live in more open enclosures but still need too much keeper support to live on the open range. This is a family friendly way to see animals close up and we walked the paths. Coyle loved “catching pictures” of the animals and was so excited to see his first zebra. This was not a place I was all that interested in visiting but I’m so glad we did.

After our morning animal encounters we headed to a few places that I was really looking forward to seeing. The first was the Kazuri bead factory. Kazuri, which means small and beautiful in Swahili, beads are exported all over the world. The mission of the factory is to “provide and sustain employment opportunities for disadvantaged members of Kenyan society, especially single mothers”. All of the beads are hand crafted and painted and are incredibly beautiful. They employ over 340 artists and provide not only jobs but medical care and other support to the workers and their families. We took a tour of the factory where Coyle had the chance to work with the clay. Then he proved himself a very savvy shopper and picked out lots of presents for people and a beautiful necklace for himself. Apparently I just come along to pay the bills! He did tell me “don’t worry mommy I’ll pick out a present for you too”.

Our last stop of the day was at the Bomas of Kenya. The word bomas means homes in Swahili and it 

is a place which celebrates the different tribal cultures found in Kenya. We went to a show where they performed dances, songs, music and acrobatics from all over the country. The show was phenomenal. Coyle danced and clapped through the whole first half but didn’t quite make it through the second act!  I loved it because western tourists were a really small part of the audience. Instead it was mostly Kenyan school groups. Many of the students we have met love yelling “hello” to Coyle and he has just as much fun waving back and yelling “Jambo” back! 

It was a full and great day in Nairobi. Tomorrow we head out to Amboseli for a few days for a safari. More adventures to come!

More pictures from today.

This system is tricky on my phone so excuse any of my weird formatting issues. It looks on this end that the rest of the pictures I tried to add to today’s post didn’t add so here they are again. Well never mind- now it looks like they posted here and twice on the other page. At least my kid and the elephants are both cute cause now I can’t get this deleted!

Kissing giraffes and other dirty things.

After a long trip we arrived in Nairobi at dawn this morning. Coyle walked off the plane and started asking everyone where the trees were. Apparently all of Africa is full of trees. I guess mommy had better work on his geography skills. There were animal statues all around the airport so Coyle thought  we should just live in the airport but I convinced him there was even more to see if we left. This is Coyle’s 4th continent and I will never get over watching his face as he tries to understand a place so different from home.

This morning we had the opportunity to see two amazing animal sanctuaries that are doing really good work. First we visited the giraffe center which is working on breeding the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe as well as conservation education. Coyle has been dying to see giraffes so he was so excited. Somehow I brought up months ago about a story I saw of someone kissing a giraffe. So anyway this became a thing until Coyle really thought I wanted a kiss from a giraffe. Well I was up for it till I learned it was not just putting your head next to a giraffe and snapping a picture. Oh no. It is way more involved than that. You have to put a pellet of their food between your lips and let them take it out 🤢But this morning I started to think - well when in Kenya... So yup. You guessed it. I kissed a giraffe and there is photographic evidence.

 I’m pretty sure neither one of us was impressed by that experience!  After all that Coyle was also unimpressed and he just keeps saying “mommy that was giraffe food - you’re not a giraffe, why’d you put it in your mouth?”

The second place we visited was the Sheldrick elephant and rhino orphanage. They rescue orphaned elephants and rhinos throughout Kenya. They currently have 15 young elephants that they are working to rehabilitate and return to the wild. For one hour a day the orphanage is open to the public to watch a feeding and learn a little bit about the projects they have around the country. We saw 13 elephants-many of who were still under 2 years old and were being bottle fed. Apparently after decades of research they found the best food for baby elephants is human baby formula but these big guys are fed every 3 hours around the clock and drink about 24 liters of formula a day - and I thought Coyle was an expensive baby!

What was incredibly sad was that most of these elephants were orphaned due to human interactions - poaching, mining (several were rescued from mine shafts or wells) and drought caused by over farming. The trust does a lot of work with education and political advocacy in the hopes of saving these elephants. The reintegration process takes years and years as they have to move the elephants out of the nursery to a game range outside the city and work with them until they are accepted into a new elephant family. Interestingly they have decided not to microchip them or track the
 In any way once they are released into the wild because they don’t want to interfere with their natural life. However they said that it’s true that an elephant never forgets and every year they have formerly orphaned female elephants bringing their babies to the game range (which borders on the national park area where they are released) to show them off to the staff who took care of them when they were young.
During the lecture Coyle was right in there taking pictures like the tourist he is!  We also learned that a baby elephants two favorite things to do are eat and play in the dirt. Apparently Coyle is secretly a baby elephant. He is loving the red Kenyan soil and would have played in it all afternoon if I let him!

The Paris airport

Well we made it to Paris. Coyle slept most of the flight and I watched bad movies. We have a long layover here but we’re making the most of it. It’s pouring out so that makes me feel better about our decision not to try and make a quick trip to the Eiffel Tower even though Coyle asked if we could go as soon as I told him we were flying through France.
According to Coyle the best things we saw today were a dog wearing a diaper and French garbage cans. He was also very excited that when he barfed on the plane he got it all in the bag!  Unfortunately Coyle was not blessed with a strong stomach - luckily it doesn’t bother him at all.
Now he’s playing happily in a play area with some young French girls. I wonder if any of them want to get married in the next few weeks!
Well

In a few hours we’ll be off to Nairobi and we’ll get there early Wednesday morning and hopefully start seeing the sights right away. Unfortunately Coyle is convinced that we are going to the beach in Africa and no matter how much I’ve explained Kenyan geography to him there’s no convincing him so he may be mighty disappointed. (We didn’t have the time or budget to fly to the coast on this trip)

We’re gonna go go go go on an adventure

Coyle, Mr. Snuggles, Sharky and I are ready for our summer adventure. Right now we’re people watching in JFK waiting for our first flight. There’s currently an amber alert in Brooklyn so every phone in the airport just started buzzing at the same time. That’s not at all terrifying!  

So where are we going?  Coyle’s bucket list for the summer was to go to the beach, Canada, Africa (he preferred Madagascar) and to go to outer space. We’re not going to Madagascar but we are going to Africa to see elephants, giraffes, zebras and monkeys. More specifically (since I yell at my 9th graders that Africa is a continent not a country and now find myself yelling the same thing at my 4 year old) we are going to Kenya. We’re flying out tonight to Paris then we have a long layover in the airport. It’s one of those ones that is just too short to go out and explore but long enough to be annoying. I have already staked out the play areas in the airport to check out. Then we will fly from Paris to Nairobi. I’m most excited about the culture and Coyle is most excited for the animals so we’ve tried to plan a trip that covers both. We’ll try to update our

Blog as much as possible as we go. We’re both so excited about our adventure.