Nairobi U18 ITF Grade 5 (week 1), Day 7

Friday 10th February 2012

The phrase “it was another early start at the Nairobi Club” has been a ongoing joke amongst us all for the last couple of weeks as we have an early start everyday but it was more appropriate today as we were up and at breakfast by 6.15am.

By 6.30am we were all ready to leave for the safari but one person hadn’t arrived yet – Jack’s dad. He’d decided to fly over from Cairo to join Jack for the weekend as tomorrow is Jack’s 17th Birthday but Jack had no idea he was coming. When Tony arrived at 6.40am Jack was just walking down the stairs to reception and the look on his face was priceless!

By 6.45am we were all in the van and on our way to our first stop of the day – the Nairobi National Park. Once we’d paid our entry fee we were back in the van and into the park trying to spot anything that resembled an animal – we think that the rangers had planted trees that look like animals as to begin with that was all we kept spotting!

Eventually we started to see more and more animals and the deeper we went into the National Park the better the variety became. Throughout the 2 and a half hours we were in the National Park we spotted Impala’s, Ostriches, Warthogs, Buffalos, Baboons, Rhinos, Giraffes, Zebras and a whole load of other animals which we didn’t know the names of! It was great to see them all in their natural habitat and I think the highlight for everyone was seeing 9 or 10 Giraffes running across the road in front of us.

After the National Park we went to the Animal Orphanage where it was nice to see some of the animals we hadn’t seen in the park but it was difficult to see them all caged up. It’s great that they have rescued the animals as they would have died in the wild and it’s fantastic that the local school children can learn from seeing them but it’s still not nice to see such wild animals with such little space to roam.

From there we went to the best place of the day which was to see the Baby Elephant Orphanage at The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. We spent over an hour there (which is when they bring the elephants back to the site to feed each day between 11am-12pm before they then go back to the wild) which was absolutely fantastic. We listened for an hour to one of the keepers taking about the projects they have going on at the moment while the Baby Elephants were being fed behind her.

At 11.30am the youngest Elephants were guided back to the National Park and the slightly older ones came in for their turn to feed. It was amazing to watch huge Elephants drinking the same milk (SMA Gold) that my 6 month old daughter currently has each evening. The only difference was that my daughter has 8oz per evening where as the Elephants have 12 pints every 3 hours – that’s a hell of a lot of formula to make up but thanks to SMA, British Airways and a lot of other supporters the charity manages to keep the costs down.

If you ever want to support an animal charity then I think this is one of the best I’ve ever seen so please check out the website for more details – www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org

Our last stop of the day was to the Nairobi Safari Walk where Tony, Jack and I decided to give it a go while the others grabbed some food and relaxed. It was again a great experience and it gave us a chance to get much closer to all of the animals including the Rhinos and the Cheetahs – Jack’s highlight though was spotting a Crocodile in the middle of the National Park from high up on the walkway!

 

 

By 2pm we were all well and truly done for the day so we went back to the hotel to catch up on a bit of sleep and relax for the afternoon before having the traditional Friday night BBQ at the Hotel. After that we had a couple of frames of snooker before getting an early night to prepare for a full days training tomorrow.