Africa ! Nairobi – our first stop

trumstravels

Dec 4

Africa is one of the countries I have always wanted to go to, ever since I was a young 'un, I love animals and boy oh boy does Africa have them! We chose a tour that did 2 weeks in Kenya and 1 week in Tanzania. Africa is a long way away from where I live, a very tiring trip. We left home about 1030 a.m. on Tuesday 11 July. We stopped in London after about 7 hours on the plane and we had a 4 hour layover before we left for Nairobi and that was about a 9 hour flight. We arrived in Nairobi on Wednesday at approximately 0930 p.m. their time. They are about 9 hours ahead of us. We didn't do a lot in Nairobi, the flight really took it's toll on me. We did go out and walked around the city and it's a big city, population 5,325,000. Isn't that something? In Canada the whole county is 40 million people and they have over 5 million in one city.

Clint at the Beerhive bar in Toronto airport
hahaha this little vacuum cleaner caught my eye

For those wondering, we went with Collette Tours and a Collette rep met us at the airport in Nairobi. It was only about a 20 minute drive to our hotel but it was dark and we didn't get to see too much. We were both very tired but managed to get up before 10 the next morning for our free, included breakfast lol. The hotel was beautiful but I don't have too many photos from this stay but I did take more photos when we came back through Nairobi later on in our tour and we stayed here again. The hotel was called the Sarova Stanley and has an interesting history. Mayence Bent was the original founder in 1902. Disaster struck in 1904 when the Great Fire of Victoria Street destroyed the hotel. They rebuilt the hotel and in the early days you had a fantastic view of Mt. Kilimanjaro from the verandah on the 2nd floor. Lots of famous people have stayed at the Stanley over years including Sean Connery, Sidney Poitier, Grace Kelly, Karen von Blixen, Clark Gable and more. Karen von Blixen is the lady in the Out of Africa book/movie.

Our room
View from our room, a parade went by while we were there
Another view of downtown Nairobi from the hotel
One more view !

The restaurant in the hotel, one of them, is called the Thorn Tree Cafe and is built around a huge tree where people would leave messages for each other. Back then, there were no IPhones, texting, emails etc and as this was a well known hotel, people would stop in and leave/receive messages from the tree. In the photo below, in the middle you can see a bulletin board and tree.

They had a rooftop pool, an Asian restaurant and a very cool bar called the Exchange Bar. They had wonderful cocktails at this bar and Katherine looked after us whenever we went in for a cocktail and/or a bite to eat. She made the best cocktails. Prior to being the Exchange bar, it was called the Long Bar (in 1922). A famous tidbit is that it took delivery of the first ever order from a new brewery called Kenya brewery, makers of beers such as Tusker and this brewery is now the largest brewery in the country. This bar was also Nairobi's first Stock Exchange from 1954 to 1991.

Entering the bar
I love this look
My happy place haha
Rooftop pool which also had a bar

We spent a couple of days there until our tour started. There were only 8 of us, 4 Canadians and 4 Americans so the four Canadians went in one safari jeep with our driver Major and the others went with Mr Chris in his jeep. Our tour director, Wallace took turns driving in the jeeps. There was an American family of five that were supposed to be with us but there flight was canceled and they didn't end up joining our tour until Tuesday, our tour started on a Saturday morning. When they joined us, there was a third jeep and driver.

Our Jeep, roof lifts up so when it is up, we can stand up in the vehicle, which we did a lot
Some views as we were leaving Nairobi
More views as we were leaving Nairobi