Travelogue 7 Final for Africa trip- Nairobi to Home

Our last evening in Nairobi we went out to what is called the Wild Life

Park hotel and had our farewell group meal together. We were served all different kinds of meat such as Ostriage, Crocadile, Kangeroo, pork, beef, goat, lamb, chicken and other. The Ostriage was especially good. They also had about a 2 hour show of African dances and acrobatic's and after that a live band. A bus took us from the hotel and back. We certainly noticed that there are no stop signs or stop lights in the large city but rather round abouts and yield signs. If there is a light no one stops as in the past there have been car jacking. This is not the problem it was. We gave a tip to our guides and said good bye as the rest were leaving in the morning. That afternoon I had sent out a travelogue from the hotel. The next morning we met Trace our Dutch guide for breakfast and discussed the trip. She helped us make arrangements and we went to the Nairobi NP to the orphan facility. There we seen an orphan Rhino and some elephants. They explained how they raise them and get them back into the wild.

After getting back to the hotel we met Trace and went downtown on the bus with the locals. It was very reasonably priced but very crowded. We spent a couple of hours downtown and I got a couple of really nice t-shirts for about $8.00. Nairobi has a reputation of having a lot of crime and robberies but we found there was no problem. We certainly had left all our valuables back in the hotel safe and had nothing with us that would attract attention. We saw a number of tourists carrying thing and we seen no problems at all. Apparently just like Mexico City it is not nearly as bad as it is made out to be. Nairobi seemed to have everything and supplies the needs for a wide area in this part of Africa. We met Trace and got back on the bus. We got dropped off a couple of blocks from the hotel and walked. We got things organized for our evening flight and "SMILELY" who picked us up about 25 days ago would be taking us out to the airport. We ate and had spent all our Kenya money downtown for snacks We were at the airport early and had no problem with our exit papers. We checked our luggage all the way through to Minneapolis, MN USA so we would not have to deal with it in Amsterdam where we had most of the day to look around. We got a little sleep and got into Amsterdam just as it was getting light. We got some Euro's and got on the train and headed into town. We had help from Young Peter of our group and he definitely gave us the correct information. The Euro is strong against the dollar so it was expensive. We soon found everything in Amsterdam was expensive with a bottle of Coke being about $2.50. We got a tour lined up on a canal boat. We walked to the Rembrandt museum, the Anne Frank House was closed and seen a lot of the downtown area. There are lots of canals, shops, buses, and trolly cars, and bicycles. We did a lot of walking and eventually got back for our canal boat tour. We had some food but it was terribly expensive for some bakery things. We then headed back on the train. At the airport after waiting awhile it was announced our flight had technical difficulties and would be delayed. Eventually we had to stay over night so we had a voucher to get bathroom articles as we could not get at our luggage and we could get food and they gave us phone cards. We were put up in a hotel near the airport and the fed us an evening meal and breakfast. We also got a $250 credit for a future flight. We took off about 9 am and got into Minneapolis about 11 am due to the time difference. We seen the coast of Europe, Great Britain, Ireland and then northern Canada from the plane and Canada by Hudson Bay and south into MN all the way to landing. We had no problem getting our car rental as it was within 24 hours of when it should of been. We had ice cream on the way home as we had not had ice cream on the trip due to food safety concerns. We visited with Leroy, Ediths brother in Sioux Falls and got our car which he had been watching. We stopped and got groceries since we emptied our refridgerator and shut of the power while we were gone. We were gone a total of 50 days and certainly seen what we had set out to do and that was to see most of the animals in Africa.