After waking up to our alarm at 5:37am, we grabbed a quick breakfast and were soon on our way in a safari jeep to Nairobi National Park just south of Nairobi. It is a unique park in that it is fenced in on three sides so that animals don’t walk freely through the streets of Nairobi. The fourth side, however, is wide open and allows the animals to freely roam about in their usual migration patterns often with high rises in the background. We made a brief stop by the ivory burning site, which is a sort of memorial to the loss of elephants due to poaching. There are incidentally no elephants in the park — more due to urbanization of Nairobi than poaching, but the mounds were almost 12 tons of captured ivory that was burned by the government. As I learned in my economics class at Hawai’i Pacific University, this act then raised the price of ivory to historic levels making poaching more profitable, but the thought was there…maybe.
We were asked which animals we were most interested in seeing. Not being our first rodeo safari, we have seen just about all the animals that one could hope to see in Africa, but we’ve only seen one rhinoceros. That lone sighting was back in 2019 when we were doing a self-driving safari through Namibia and chanced upon a lonely and depressed rhino that walked away at the first sight of elephants in the distance. Perhaps it was luck that we found five black rhinos within the first 30 minutes of entering Nairobi Park. Just as a little shoutout to myself, the driver asked us if we knew what kind they were and I said black and was correct. I still strive to be as good as a South African boy we once met who was spotting ear tags on springbok at 800m, but I’m working on it.
The rhinos were at some distance here, but still neat to see them interacting with each other. We lingered there for a spell before getting caught up in a frenzy of safari jeeps who saw a trio of lionesses. This moment made us really reflect on how lucky we’ve been. It requires more effort to get to places like the Serengeti, but there was more space for both animals and safari jeeps to spread out there. That allowed us to be face to face with lions without any other humans present. The aggressiveness of some of the drivers and noisiness of their passengers in Nairobi Park was off-putting to us and to the lions, who eventually walked away annoyed despite many of the jeeps attempting to follow them. We told our driver we just wanted to go somewhere else.
There were times where we didn’t see some animals for a while, but while others had total lack of interest in non-“Big Five” animals such as zebras or ostrich, we were ok with lingering if we were at least away from other people. I think our driver may have been a bit new because Nicole and I were spotting things in the distance before he was. He also needed to work on warning us about when he was going to start or stop as we were both thrown about the jeep unceremoniously. I spotted some more rhinos in the far distance at one point and he made note of it, even though he couldn’t see them himself, and promised that we would come back through that area on our way out.
Flash forward an hour or two later, and after watching some storks, hippos, and a few crocodiles, we returned to the area where I pointed them out again. They hadn’t wandered far. The driver made his way over to them and got us extremely close. So close that at one point, I had to switch lenses because my zoom lens couldn’t fit them anymore. We were supposed to be done with the safari around 12, but he seemed to be fine with letting us observe these white rhinos. While they look the same as the black ones, they are distinguished by wider mouths.
Eventually we made our way out of the park and back to the Hilton, arriving there around 1:30pm. We had to check out shortly thereafter only to end up in an Uber driven by a very unfriendly man for the next 45 minutes as we worked our way to the airport. Once there, check-in, passport control, and security all went much faster than I anticipated. We were issued seats together right away. We went to a priority pass lounge for a bit to relax. Not a single part of the airport seems to be air conditioned efficiently (if at all), but at least we were away from the chaos of the main terminal. We left to walk to our gate about an hour before the flight, and whilst tchotchke shopping, we heard them make a final boarding call for our flight. We ran the rest of the way with poor Nicole and her 40 pound backpack yelling for me to go on without her. We were some of the last to board the Kenya Airways Embraer 190, but as expected, we then sat there for the next 45 minutes before the plane moved.
Sweaty and achy we took off from Nairobi amidst some passing showers. The flight to Kigali was just over an hour, but that didn’t stop the Kenya Airways crew from serving drinks, sandwiches, and running the Duty Free cart through the aisle. We touched down in Kigali, Rwanda as the sun was setting. We purchased our East Africa tourist visas on arrival, which took just a little bit of time and an entire page in our passports. We emptied into an area with people hawking taxi rides. It is one my least favorite things, but we eventually negotiated a price with a less aggressive guy and for the third time today got stuck in traffic, but this time in a new country. 30 minutes later, after climbing up and down the hills of Kigali, we were at the Four Points by Sheraton. Not a Hilton!
We ate dinner at a rooftop terrace while Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande pumped through the sound system. Nicole had a pizza. I had fish n’ chips. It would have been easy to forget where we were. Tomorrow we commence our 3-day adventure into Uganda in search of various primates, but not before paying a visit to the Genocide Memorial here in Kigali. It is a pretty intense and horrific thing that happened here not that long ago…in our lifetimes. I am anxious and apprehensive to see it.
passports & pepto bismol 