Needopedia

Dear Mom and Dad (aka Joanne and Gary),

Thank you for potty-training me when I was little. Otherwise, I would have had trouble containing myself and Kenya would be a little messier in my wake. I have been extremely excited as we have begun our safari adventure.

Today is our 4th day on Safari, and I have been absolutely drenched in African animals. The first day, we started at an Elephant Orphanage & Rescue, enjoying the baby antics during bottle-feeding, and the girls adopted an orphaned elephant for a year. From there, we drove to the Giraffe Centre, where we all got to hand feed, well, giraffes.

From there, we left Nairobi and drove toward the Great Rift Valley, where we got an amazing view of the valley and a quick geography lesson. Throw in a lecture about how the great rift is really a bunch of smaller rifts all put together, and we have an education. (Good thing I’m not in charge of knowledge. The sun would clearly be revolving around the earth and the Great Rift would just be one giant rift in an enormous continent. Also, we wouldn’t know how to make fire.)

We arrived at Great Rift Lodge that afternoon but really hadn’t seen that many animals that hadn’t already been (figuratively) plattered for our viewing pleasure. That changed very quickly the next day.

We began the day with a 6:30 bird walk. I was only mildly interested in birds before our Amazon and Galapagos adventures really turned me off to dreary-colored birds that I was supposed to spend the better part of a day admiring. But African birds? I am willing to take a hiatus from my apathy. But while we were looking at the ibis, guineafowl and weaver birds, impalas and zebras grazed nearby. A bushbuck trotted across a green while we made fun of the Egyptian geese (like Canada geese in every obnoxious way, but more attractive). We settled in for our bush breakfast overlooking the 14th hole*, where warthogs placidly ate.

Our driver had already arranged a boat tour for us at Lake Naivasha for the rest of the morning. The half-hour drive there flipped my skirt, or would have if I hadn’t been dressed safari-sensible. We spotted baboons, camels, ostriches, zebras, and storks just from the main roads.

And then it got better. In the two-hour boat ride, we came across dozens of hippos, partially submerged for the daytime relief from the sun. These guys, in particular, put on a show. Hippos usually show up at the top of Africa’s most dangerous animals, so our guide watched closely for bubbles near us. I lived to write this, so he was successful.

At the lake, we also saw heaps of birds and even watched an African eagle catch a fish our guide tossed. I actually wrote down names of 37 birds that we saw and developed a bit of a crush on the pied kingfisher. We headed toward Crescent Island, where both Out of Africa and Born Free were filmed. It’s now a bit of an oasis for grazers, who were brought in as scenery and left without predators. Again, we saw zebra alongside waterbuck, gazelles and (hurray!) giraffes.

On the third day, after a long drive, we arrived at our second camp, Sweetwater Serena, in Ol Pejeta Conservancy. Here, Africa really started showing off. After finding our tents and a white rhino (!) at the watering hole, we were ready for an afternoon drive and ran across lions almost right away.

We spotted a lioness hanging out on a bit of a hillside when our guide spotted another one trotting across the marsh, making the herds of cape buffalo, impalas, and waterbucks a wee bit nervous. The sisters met up right in front of our jeep and went off to the bush together. Not much later, we came across King Lion himself, determined to get his 20 hours of sleep in before bedtime. Fortunately, our guide speaks lion and got the beast to briefly open his eyes. We had been looking for elephants but decided a Lion (and rhino) Day was more than acceptable.

Wish you were here! Dad, you would love just seeing the country, and Mom would get a kick out of game rides.

Love,

Denise

*Pure fiction: I have no idea which of the 18 holes the dining room overlooked.

**We found out later that we were charged services fees for these meals outside. I was a little annoyed because we sat at our inside table and were escorted outside to enjoy the view twice. It was cleared up eventually. We also pay for the bottled water, but they were opened for us just as we were sitting down, with no chance to ask for bigger or fewer bottles. This is the only place that we were charged for anything we didn’t explicitly ask for.

Note: Between low concurrence of downtime, internet, and creativity, it can take me 2-8 days to write a post and add photos. So the most fictional part of the post is the publish date–it is aspirational, not accurate.