Elephants. Who would ever think you’d get bored of elephants? Well, we didn’t really get bored, but we did see so many of them, so often that we would take a couple of pictures and scoot on quickly. The most enjoyable part of all the elephants was all the elephant babies. They are a riot to watch. One crossed the road then couldn’t get up the little hill on the other side. He tried and tried and it almost looked like he was laughing at himself. Adorable!
We took both an evening game drive and a morning drive. Both were really neat and we saw oodles of different types of animals, but we really didn’t see much more than we did in Nairobi National Park (except there weren’t any elephants in Nairobi at all – they are very destructive!). In reading the reviews of all the game parks in Kenya, I really believe it’s luck of the draw what kind of experience you’re going to have. Our driver for these two weeks, Newton, says that he takes it personally when he can’t track an animal and he feels really badly, but it happens. He was following cat prints while we were out but we never saw any big cats (or small, either) in Samburu. But maybe people there the next day saw several. You just never know.
Samburu Sopa Lodge was pretty nice. It was a main building with a pool and restaurant surrounded by small two-room buildings that completed one side of a semi-circle. Actually, the rooms were ginormous, when I think about it. Within the semi-circle was a watering hole and a grassland area, so the animals could really come right up to your porch or to the restaurant. They say that the animals prefer to stay far away from people, but there were TONS of security guards all over the place wearing snazzy uniforms and carrying batons. Just in case, I guess. I set up the camera on the back porch and got photos of the stars. Orion’s belt was up there but in the photos you can barely tell because there are so many other stars that are within that one constellation. In the picture below, look for 3 stars running from the upper left to the lower right, towards the bottom of the photo. The thatch you see in the bottom right was from the roof of the room. It was open underneath all the way around where we have our flashing under the roofline.
During the morning game drive we saw – you guessed it – elephants! and giraffes, warthogs, monkeys (not sure what kind), ostriches & some cool birds. We also managed to get the truck stuck. I was just amused, but I think Newton was a bit concerned since he was tracking a cat, after all. We got out of the gully due to some fabulous pushing effort and some machete action. The winning pusher was Dr. PJ – not the two guys standing there now.
No comments:
Post a Comment