Mombasa, Kenya

JAMBA!!!  This is the greeting we heard upon exiting the ship!  It’s a Swahili greeting.  Kenya used to be a British colony.  Each of the tribes continued to use their own tribal language and most belonged to the Bantu family. The Kikuyu tribe is the biggest. Swahili and English are the official language.  At this time (1970) Kenya was struggling with Somali guerrillas.

Colorful crowd who met our ship.

Mombasa is on a coral island and has been important since Phoenician times.   We visited Fort Jesus which was an old Portuguese fort built in the 17th Century. There are ruins of churches, watch towers, and blockhouses left by the Portuguese before they were ousted. 

I’m with some little kids in Mombasa.  I like kids!!! 

Entrance to Fort Jesus

Fort Jesus – an old Portuguese settlement.

A Portuguese stone at Fort Jesus that’s thousands of years old.

Mombasa was mainly a seaport and resort with great beachside hotels.

We then went by train to Nairobi.  It’s a clean city with modern architecture.  Even though it was considered a “modern” city, leopards and hyenas still raid people’s chickens and pet dogs at the edge of town.  YIKES!!!  Five miles from the city is the Nairobi National Park where animals can run freely!  

We went up to Treetops, a fancy hotel perched in an enormous fig tree in the Aberdare Forst in the Kikuya tribe’s turf.  It was just a cool hotel.  We’ve seen those before.

This is the entrance gate to Tsavo National Park

If you look closely, you’ll see a buzzard in the tree.  

These are elephants in Tsavo National Park.  I was so excited to see the wild animals and I didn’t know we’d be able to get closer to them so I took pictures when they were too far away.

You do get to get closer!!!!!  They are incredible!!!!  I hope you notice how to tell the difference between African elephants and Asian elephants from India and Ceylon!  This picture MAY be from the Serengeti…not sure!  😊

Can you spot the giraffe?

If you go into the Kilaguni Lodge, you can safely watch them.  We heard about Olduvai Gorge where Dr. Leaky and his wife discovered the oldest know human remains.  (Just a heads up….other remains have since been found, so they’re not the oldest anymore, but in 1970, they were.)

Someone suggested that we go overland to Tanzania and meet the ship there.  Of course, I said YES!!  We were getting confident in our ability to figure things out even though we spoke none of the languages.  Confident?  Or cocky?