The iBot zone

Let's take a break from animals for now and have a look at the pulsing heart of Kenya's hustle and bustle: the Central Business District in Nairobi. Our visit there was quite a bit rougher on the edges than we expected. Business district always sounds impersonal and clean – high-rise buildings and people wearing ties. Already on our way in it was clear that these expectations wouldn't exactly be met. We walked through the John Michuki Memorial Park which is bordering the city center. Through this park flows the Nairobi river which apparently consists purely of waste water, but still crocodiles seem to find a living among the trash there. Even if the sewers are clogged... ... the pipes can be put to good alternative use as bridges. Generally, maintaining infrastructure is a problem in city that grew too fast and where there is too little money for public services. Once we arrived at the central streets, the busy hustling augmented exponentially. There seem to be specialize...

Last time I promised animals, this time there shall be animals! So far we experienced animals in three different settings: 1. Zoos in Nairobi 2. National Parks, in our case Lake Nakuru and Mount Longonot 3. The Maasai Mara National Reserve In this post I'll focus on the zoos in Nairobi. In the Animal Orphanage is a treatment and rehabilitation center for savanna wildlife. The animals are held in good condition, but still too small fenced areas compared to their situation in the wilderness. The animals we saw were: gazelles, antelopes, cheetahs, a leopard, lions, hyenas, monkeys and water-buffalos. Most impressive was that we could feed the leopard and the lions – for a little tip to the game wardens of course. Some schools from all over the country also visited the Orphanage. Sven even used the time to tie up some business deals. As in all tourist places, the army was on guard duty. After that we moved on the Mamba Village . Mamba means crocodile in kiswahili – so not to be confus...

No post since while, I know I know... The difficulty with the pics and the result didn't exactly raise my motivation. The solution, as it seems with all unpleasant things in life, is a compromise: from now on I'll just drop the pics as they are imported into Blogger without doctoring around. Since I have a backlog of about a week, I'll write about the experiences of last Sunday and Monday (3rd and 4th of July 2022). Sunday was pretty slow, we still had to recover from a lost night's sleep + going out on the first night – easy, no heavy lifting ;) We went for a walk in Karura forest which is situated within Nairobi city and still a natural habitat. At the entrance was logically a checkpoint with Kalashnikov armed military and around it the whole barbed wire fence program. And of course an entrance fee to pay. In Kenya there seem to be a lot of those. The fee is usually very little for Kenyans (this case 100 KSH which is less than 1€),  more for expat residents (200 KSH)...

So let's fast forward a few days since the last post: in essence there was a short nice stay in Munich and a sleepless flight via Dubai to Nairobi. Oh, and the first days in Nairobi of course! Since we landed in the morning, I had the opportunity to see Kenya from above from the border city of Mandera in the North-East to Nairobi in the South-West. The sun hadn't risen yet and the country was shrouded in haze, but general landscape features such as hills and rivers were recognizable through that. What struck me immediately was the utter lack of lights on the ground. We crossed the whole of Kenya diagonally and the first lights visible from the airplane were 10 minutes before landing – nine dots of light, to be precise! Kenya is a country with about 55 million people spread over an area 580.367sqkm – so it's not like it's uninhabited. We spent the first day strolling around in our neighborhood – the expat district called Westlands . Privileged (and white) people all live...