Monday, January 7, 2013

A Day of Leisure, Cell Phones, Baby Elephants in Nairobi, and Ice Cubes in Beer

We awoke at 8 a.m. after a fretful jet-lagged sleep and headed to the dining room for a hearty breakfast of cereal, fruit, juice, eggs, sausage, chicken livers, beans, and coffee.   Then we sat around the beautiful grounds of the Sportsview Hotel, rested, and did the mundane tasks associated with discovering what we forgot to pack and getting our cell phones up and running.

 

Safaricom, probably the largest of the many Kenyan cell phone service providers, has made the task much more difficult than it used to be – apparently for the sake of security.  Used to be that you bought a SIM card for 100 shillings (about $1.25), bought some airtime on a scratch-off card, and you were ready to go.   But, no longer.   Now you must REGISTER.  After more than a few faltering attempts by us and by the salesperson at the desk to register our new SIM cards, we were finally ready to go, so we thought.   To register a SIM card, you must supply your name (of course), your passport number or national ID number (seems like a bit much), your birthdate (you must be 18 or over), and do it all on somebody else’s phone (cuz yours doesn’t work).  Then you are supposed to wait for up to 24 hours before you can use the phone.  You don’t know this until you’ve already made a call or two to let people know where they can/can’t reach you (for some inexplicable reason they let you do this before they suspend your service).  We begged and begged Safaricom (using somebody else’s phone) to reduce the 24 hours to 2 seconds, which they did.  And inflation has raised the price of the card to 150 shillings, almost two bucks.  Life’s tough.

Fruit salad and fries for lunch – yum.

 

Three o’clock and we set off with David for the David (no relation) Sheldrick Wildlife Trust refuge www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/ discovering what we forgot to pack refuge on the other side of Nairobi.  The new Thika highway is great, but it still dumps you into construction for the new, new highway.  Overall, we plan 2 hours for what we would plan on 45 minutes at home.  At 5 on the dot, we got to see the two rescued black rhinos (Solio, age 2.5 and Maxwell, age 6.5).  Both have just begun their lives, which with luck can be 45 years or so.  Both were rescued – Solio when her mother died and Maxwell when his mother abandoned him because he was/is blind).

 

Then the parade of 25 young orphan elephants began.  They were escorted from the bush to their nighttime individual enclosures (and a bottle of milk) by their keepers in groups of 6-10 or so, the youngest elephants first.  Sandy’s foster elephant, Naipoki, is now exactly three years old and she came in with the last group.  In a year or so, she will be released to the semi-wild (with keepers) of Tsavo East where she will mature until she is about nine, at which time she will take up full time residence in the wild.  Kainuk is a little older than Naipoki and will be released to Tsavo East (with her buddy, Turkwel) and four other 3-year olds in the next month or so.  Sities and Ishaq-B are the youngest of the four elephants we sponsor.  They have a couple more years at the refuge before they take the big step to Tsavo East.

The elephants all have individual personalities, but the one thing they seem to have in common is that they like the food that the next nearest elephant is eating.  Some like to play with the human visitors who visit and some don’t.  All are adorable and easy to call your own.  In fact, our grandchildren feel that they “own” the elephant we have sponsored for them.

 

The trip back to the hotel was quicker than the trip the other way.  Dinner consisted of tilapia filets (Sandy) and goat (Terry) washed down with beer.  Sandy now travels with her own ice cube trays which she gives to the hotel management and asks to be kept full and frozen.  If you have ever tried to get ice cubes in Kenya, you know why, especially if you put ice cubes in your beer as Sandy does.