By Bob Van Leer

  (NAIROBI, KENYA, East Africa, Feb. 5, 1995) - After an orientation session on our safari this morning, we took a tour of Nairobi and environs.
It's a pleasant looking city with a lot of flowers visible. Bougainvillea does extremely well, sometimes climbing to the tops of large trees.

  One of the stops on the tour was Mbogani House, the ranch home of Karen Blixen, made famous by the film "Out of Africa". The house was her home and her office for her farm. It has been restored by the Danish community of Kenya. It is a large, comfortable house and is easy to see the attraction to her. Blixen lived in the house from 1917 to 1931, when her farm had to be sold and she left Kenya, never to return.

  Nairobi is a comfortable place to live. It is only 100 miles south of the equator, but at an elevation of 5500 feet, so it is not unbearably hot. It is mid-summer here but the high temperature today was probably in the low 80s. On the minus side, however, we noted a lot of security around homes, walls and barbed wire. And many homes have signs they are protected by electronic security.

  The country is almost the size of Texas with a population (1992 est.) of 26 million. Of that, about 2.5 million are in Nairobi and its suburbs. Life expectancy is longer than much of east Africa, 59 years. Kenya has been one of the more stable nations in the area since its independence from Great Britain in 1963.

  Another stop on the tour was Giraffe Center, which has several giraffes that come over to be hand fed. Even in east Africa we can't get away from the O. J. Simpson trial. Our hotel, the Inter-Continental, has CNN International cable and this morning we were treated to a wrapup of the week's events of the trial by Larry King.

  Swahili is the principal language of Kenya, but most people speak English. English is introduced in school after the fourth grade. Our guide said most people also speak a tribal language as well as Swahili and English.

  In the evening we had dinner at a restaurant named simply "Carnivore". And it lives up to its name. We were served the Carnivore Dinner Delight. The restaurant has a circular barbecue pit and meats are barbecued on spears and skewers. For serving, the spear is taken off the rack at the barbecue pit, placed point down on your plate, and a waiter with a two-feet long knife slices meat to your request. We were served 14 different kinds of meat including hartebeest, ostrich and crocodile.

  As delicious as the meats were, we couldn't stuff down all they had. After dinner we went back to the hotel to pack. Tomorrow we will leave Nairobi by small plane and go south to the Masai Mara for our safari.