It’s layover day and the tourist trapping is in high season out here. We unfortunately haven’t taken advantage of all there is to see and eat and do in Nairobi, as our stopover is short and I’ve been busy getting hosed by yet another driver who introduced Kevin and me to a magical mystery tourist trap adventure on par with the whole Balinese coffee-gardens-slash-owl-prison detour that we went on three years ago. This time instead of 15 cups of weird coffee in probably not-washed cups and cranky nocturnal animals on leashes, we got greedy head-butting giraffes and an old house that caters to Baby Boomer females who are obsessed with Robert Redford.
Let me back up: yesterday, we hopped off our sweet little safari plane at Wilson Airport and re-entered non-safari world for a one day stay in Nairobi before our international flight to Seychelles. After a somewhat stressful bag fiasco in which we found out that our big bag with all our diving gear that was supposed to be held for us at the airport was actually in our pre-safari driver Alfred’s garage in a Nairobi suburb and he was busy for a few hours (it’s cool, we got the bags later and he’s awesome), our new driver took us to House of Waine, a cool old guest manor in the Nairobi suburb of Karen. Somewhere between talking about Nairobi National Park, which is one of the only national parks on earth bordering a capital city, and me telling him how much I liked giraffes, Simon mentioned that we definitely shouldn’t miss the Giraffe Sanctuary (sounded cool!) and the Karen Blixen Museum (I like museums, whatever). Then, slowly, I realized “you should check them out” meant “I will drive you there and since you said it sounded good it’s happening whether you like it or not.” So after 1 hour of unpacking and a weird 3 course lunch at House of Waine (I’ll get to this), we were back in the car with Simon for some good old fashioned tourist hosing. Side note is that I really do like Simon. It’s not his fault I’m too trusting.
Ok so let’s start with the Giraffe Sanctuary. It has 4.5 stars on TripAdvisor and everyone says it’s the best thing since sliced bread and now I’ll never use TripAdvisor again. You pay 15 euro (PER PERSON) for a pellet-filled paper bag the size of your fist, enter a “park” the size of the back yard of someone who has a really nice house in the suburbs, and then you shove your way through about 5 dozen other tourists (or get shoved the whole time if you’re me and you’re a wimp) so you can take a turn at feeding your dumb pellets to a super greedy giraffe who has clearly never had to work for anything in his life. I feel like the giraffes are eating too much, if you ask me. I did learn something I didn’t on safari: giraffes have crappy peripheral vision and this leads to crazy-ass head butting as they swing their long old necks around looking for food if it’s been more than 5 seconds since someone shoved a pellet in their face. It was fun to watch people ignore their surroundings while trying to take selfies and then get whacked in the head by the same angry giraffe they were trying to use as a photo prop.
To add to the misery, one of the tourists during our visit was a weird American girl in a long crocheted shawl who was part of a tour bus group and must have been stealing kids’ pellet bags because every time you turned around she’d pop up next to you, shoving people out of the way to feed the giraffe pellets out of her mouth again (yeah her mouth. it was gross.) while shouting to her weird boyfriend with a HUGE camera, “did you get it?! Did you get the shot?! Take another one! Wait for it to come up to my mouth! Did you get it?!?” I do not recommend this place. Especially if you just came from nirvana where giraffes are actually free to run around and not have to eat food out of annoying American tourists’ mouths. The only charming quality was how cute all the kids were and how thrilled they were to be feeding a giraffe. That kept my snarl in check but just barely. And I obviously still waited my turn and Kevin took a picture of me feeding a giraffe. When in Rome, bitches.
Next up in tourist hell was the Karen Blixen Musem. Again, people on Trip Advisor just loooove this place. In contrast to the giraffe sanctuary down the street, here you only have to pay 12 euro per person and you get your very own guide who is half your age and potentially even more bored and annoyed than you are. He or she will take you on a walking tour of the famed house where Karen Blixen actually lived and Out of Africa was actually filmed. The highlights so you don’t ever have to go:
- There are swarms of women in a later stage of life who are freaking out and taking pictures next to the weird collection of VHS tapes and DVDs of the Out of Africa movie where Robert Redford’s on the cover.
- There was no electricity back then but Karen Blixen kept a phone out for decoration anyway
- Karen Blixen’s shitty husband (not Robert Redford, the other Danish guy) loved hunting poor defenseless animals and in his bedroom there is a table whose base is made out of an elephant foot.
- There are some old coffee plantation machines out front that might give you tetanus
After our fun day of perpetuating stereotypes about tourists, we returned to House of Waine, our big mansion place where we have a nice big bedroom to ourselves and pretty much 1:1 staffing because no one else is staying here. Since the stay at House of Waine was the last part of the safari package that our travel company put together for us, we got a meal included as well! Awesome, except I didn’t read the itinerary closely enough and so we ate lunch and dinner there and had multiple courses of mediocre food for both meals before we put 2 and 2 together that there were prices on those menus because we had to pay for them. It was a really nice end to a 24 hours of feeling super not-hosed or anything. $200 later, we are shipping out to Seychelles for a whole lot of nothing-doing, and, I am hoping, no tourist sporting. But I dream big.
Until the Seychelles!