Safari!

Today, Rod Reed (the Deputy Vice Chancellor at ANU) and his daughter Hannah took us through the Nairobi National Game Park. We started very early so that we could get there by 7am when the park opens and when the animals are most active. Rod was actually killing two birds with one stone on this visit. First, he had promised us when we got here to take us to the game park. Second, he wanted to teach Hannah (age 13) to drive. He has two older girls that he has taught to drive, and each time he takes them to the game park for their first experience. The parks offer wide open dirt roads with very little traffic, and Nairobi does not have a lot of large open parking lots like we do in the states to teach your kids to drive. The traffic in Nairobi is also atrocious. Take any traffic you’ve seen in the states, multiply it by 100, remove all traffic lights, remove all lines on the road, forget about any traffic laws, and there you have it! Actually, there are a couple of traffic lights downtown, but no one pays attention to them, so they might as well not be there. They also have a lot of traffic circles that would be a nightmare for a first time driver. Even as an experienced driver, I would crawl up into the fetal position under the dashboard if I had to navigate one of them! The Kenyans also have a very different perception of a safe distance between vehicles when driving than Americans do. They come within inches of each other, and just as close to pedestrians (which there are a lot of on the side of the roads – I just forgot to throw sidewalks out earlier too). We are just glad that we don’t have to drive while we are here!

Anyway, we got to the game park and didn’t know what to expect. It is a very large park (45 sq miles) located just on the edge of Nairobi. Rod told us that sometimes when they go they get to see a lot of animals and other times they do not. Well, we saw a lot!

We got to see rhinoceroses, giraffes, lions, crocodile, baboons, water bucks, ostriches, zebras, storks, gazelles, wildebeest and a lot of other things that I do not remember the name of. It was really neat to get to see the animals in their environment and it was a lot of fun to drive around searching for them. It was also unique since you can see the Nairobi skyline (or ANU) in the background with the animals up close.

Since the animals are used to vehicles, you can drive up pretty close to them. We actually got within 20 ft of a lion and lioness! Maddy had lots of fun spotting the animals and taking pictures of them (she actually took most of them you see here!). Sometimes she would spot animals that no one else ever got to see, but other times she would find animals before we would and we would all get to see them.

We all enjoyed eating a picnic lunch in the Reeds car while watching the zebra and elands at the watering hole. However, after lunch, we were all pretty weary of looking at animals. Although they were amazing, there are only so many zebras and giraffes you can see…

It really was a lot of fun and we did not even mind that Hannah had a driving lesson since she turned out to be an excellent driver. While we hear that there are other larger game parks with even more animals in Kenya, we think we got our fill right here in Nairobi!







Finally, we thought we should include a picture of Maddy with some of her friends from school. Can you figure out which one is Maddy??? The little girl in the back with her is her good friend Valerie.