Nairobi Elephant Orphanage & Giraffe Centre Tour: Hand-feed giraffes

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Free cancellationTravelers' pick

1/9

Duration6h

GroupUp to 100

LanguagesEN

PickupAt your hotel

Watch orphaned elephants drink milk, then feed giraffes by hand

A six-hour tour from Nairobi with hotel pickup takes you to David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage to watch baby and young orphaned elephants during the 11am–12pm viewing window, then to Giraffe Centre for a supervised hand-feeding session with endangered Rothschild giraffes. Entrance fees and a professional guide are included; food and drinks are not. The Elephant Orphanage sits inside Nairobi National Park, which requires a separate conservancy fee of $85 per person if you want to visit it.

Step-by-step itinerary

Visit Giraffe Centre and Elephant Orphanage

Pick up from Nairobi hotel
Feed Rothschild giraffes at Giraffe Centre
Walk through David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage 11am-12pm
Watch baby elephants feed and play
Visit Kazuri Bead Factory and gift shop

The Experience

The tour picks you up from your Nairobi hotel and heads first to Giraffe Centre, where you hand-feed Rothschild giraffes under the supervision of keepers. The centre has rescued and hand-reared around 500 orphaned giraffes since 1979, and the feeding session gives you a close look at how these animals behave and what they eat. You learn about their physiology and habitat while the giraffes come to you for food.

From there you're driven to David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage, where viewing happens between 11am and 12pm in an open space with a rope fence. The youngest elephants trot out of the bush to greet their keepers, who stand ready with giant bottles of milk. You watch each calf drink for 10–15 minutes, then see them play and interact with their keepers. The keepers explain how old each elephant is, where it was rescued from, and why it became orphaned — the most common reasons being poaching of the mother, falling into wells, or human-wildlife conflict. Once the youngest are fed and led back into the bush, the 2–3 year olds come out; some feed themselves while others are still bottle-fed by staff.

The final stop is Kazuri Bead Factory, a pottery and ceramic workshop that employs single mothers from poor Nairobi neighbourhoods. You're shown the stages from raw material to finished bead, and there's a gift shop stocked with their wares. The workshop closes Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday, though the shop stays open seven days a week. The whole tour runs six hours from pickup to drop-off.

What’s included

Hotel pickup and drop-off within Nairobi.
entrance fees to David Sheldrick Elephant Orphanage and Giraffe Centre.
professional English-speaking guide.
small group tour format.

Good to know

Easy physical levelStroller friendlyInfants must sit on laps

Operated by Gracepatt Ecotours Kenya

Is this one for you?Choose this if you want to see both elephants and giraffes in one day with a guide who times everything around the fixed 11am elephant viewing window—you won't need to coordinate two separate trips or figure out the schedule yourself.