Milimani Backpackers - Nairobi - Reviews & Contact Details

Our family (2 adults and 4 children aged between 6 and 17)spent 1 month in Kenya in the summer of 2009.We stayed on and off at Milimani Backpackers and Safari Center in Nairobi during our trip,we spent 9 days altogether at their place and they organised a 6 day safari for us.It's true that on arrival we were welcomed warmly but the description you can read on their website is supposedly the one that corresponds to the placebefore it had been sold to them by the previous owners.There are too many tents and the place is crowded and noisy.We had some very negative experiences concerning the prices: complete lack of transparency, plenty of inconsistencies and in the end dishonesty made our last 3 days in Nairobi VERY STRESSFUL AND UNPLEASANT. To start with, they hadn't told us that we couldn't pay by credit card , only cash. For a family of 6 to travel with several thousand euros in a country where you're constantly told not to carry cash was of course impossible, therefore , in the emergency we had to call our French bank to transfer 1900 euros to their local ,account... , except that they were unable to give us the international references of their account.We finally managed to get some information from their bank mananger with which our bank in France finally succeeded in finding the IBAN number which is necessary for the transfer- this in itself cost us quite a lot in phone calls and faxes to France.When it came to the final payment we realised that they used underestimated transfer rates when it came to converting euros to Kenyan shillings (they refused to show us the recepit of how much money they had received for the 1900 Euros we had transferred). However, when it came to converting US dollars to shillings (since safari prices are given in US dollars) they used an inflated rate for the WHOLE sum on the pretext that game park fees are converted at that rate (park fees by the way represented less then half of the total sum charged)- our 15 and 17 year old children were billed at adult rates (even though the game parks charge child rates until the age of 18); they billed us 3 entries to Maasai Mara even though we could only enter twice as the minivan they had provided broke down...I won't list all the other costs they added wrongfully such as double counting meals, or charging us for things we had not hired... When the owner, Patricia, realised in the end that she was actually owing us money despite having inflated the costs she ecame hysterical, and told our Kenya friends (who had had to intervene in all these discussions) that she would refuse "'not to win" against these Mzungus (= white people) .After several hours of tense negotiations with our kenyan friends and under threats from calling the police (or her friends from the police?) we finally paid her a supplementary 18000 Ksh so we could leave.