Day 277 - Nairobi, Kenya - 10th May, 2005 

Today we were given a driver and a 4 x 4 to take us to various local attractions. We started off at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi. This really is a national treasure and although some of the exhibits need a little loving care and attention, the whole place gives you a great potted history of the country. The museum also has a very good snake farm and we saw all the varieties of snakes found in Kenya. What's more they were all very alive and moving about, very much unlike most other snake places where the snakes all seem to hide under stones and look like they are dead. They had several very large pythons with a body circumference at least that of Julian's. The boys were ready for anything after their introduction to snakes in Thailand and were very interested in some of the particularly nasty snakes like the spitting black cobra. We stopped for a coffee and cakes in the very nice museum cafe which was also the home to a family of cats. We had great fun watching the kittens chasing each others tails and scrapping together. 

We then went with the driver out of Nairobi to the Mamba Park. This is a huge crocodile farm about an hour from the city. They were well set up for tourists and as you enter you get a personal guide who takes you to all the crocodile pools and tells you what's what. Amazingly and quite distressingly the guides jump into the enclosures and goad the crocs into action. I suppose they are trying to get a good tip from us but we would really have preferred it if they had not put themselves at risk for us and had left the crocodiles to their slumber. 

 After this we went to the giraffe sanctuary but on the way we saw Karen Blixen's House. She was the lady from Denmark who ran a coffee plantation in the 1930s and who was the inspiration for the film "Out of Africa" which rates in Julie's top 5 all time films. It was a very small place and had been kept in exactly as it might have been left. Julie loved the place and reveled in the flavour of the place and the thought about what must have been going on here all those years ago.

Then it was on to more boy stuff. We arrived at the giraffe sanctuary to be met by a very enthusiastic warden who told us all about the animals. The giraffes here are of the Rothschild variety. They have white boots on their legs as opposed to other varieties that have mottled skin all the way to their hooves. The animals were extremely tame and would even take food out of your mouth (thank you Sammy) and would allow you to pat them on their heads. Julian fell in love with the only other animals they were looking after here, the warthog. He particularly liked the idea that they fed whilst resting on their elbows not on their feet. Their necks are not long enough to reach the ground!