Our first day out in Nairobi

Tanrana has been home bound ever since we got to Nairobi because of her Appa's chickenpox. As the biased mother I have to say, she has been supurb - keeping herself occupied with the few toyes we carried by air. The one thing she didn't understand, and that did upset her enourmously, was the fact that we wouldn't let her touch Robin. Also that Robin spent most of his time locked up in a room. She sensed that he wasn't well and would sometimes look up at him with wet eyes, lips turned downwards and say Appa in a low sad tone. So today she has been extremely delighted that after 10 long days he has been hugging her again!

There is only so much indoor time that an 18 month old can deal with so we decided to take her somewhere fun today. Since she loves animals we decided on David Seldrick Wildlife Trust - the ophan elephant rearing site and the Girraffe Centre. I have to say, the decision wasn't easy as Nairobi has just so much to offer. But by the end of the day we knew we had made the right choice.

The Wildlife Trust was started in memory of David Sheldrick who pioneered techniches of raising orphaned black rhinos and elephants and reintroducing them back into the wild.

We walked to a 'viewing area' where we saw giant milk bottles standing on the ground. Soon we saw a heard of baby elephants marching towards us. So we thought, but they were running to the bottles for their morning feed!

It was adorable to watch the baby elephants drink milk in bottles. The were embracing their carers like any baby would its mother.

We spent a wonderful morning watching these elephants play like big babies with each other in the red mud, and got to know each ones name and history. Some were as young as five months. Guess what? There was a thirteen month old baby elephant called Tanno (Tarana's pet name). What a wonder first namesake for Tarana!

By the time we got the Giraffe Centre, T was a sleep but we actually got to hand-feed these beautiful animals.