Today, the girls and I did 8.5 hours of game drives.
We all started with a fabulous drive in the morning. We did a few hours of exploring in the jeep and found our elephants (many times over!), then stopped to meet Baraka, the blind black rhino. We also took in the Education Center (which managed to make education entertaining enough to engage Wes, so check school off for today!), drove some more, and then visited the chimpanzee sanctuary again, with a much better guide before returning to camp for lunch.
Wes was stick-a-fork-in-it done after the 4.5 hour morning drive, and Dwayne was being Amazing Papa with him, so the girls and I did another game ride in the afternoon, took a quick break, and then did the camp-led night drive with a spotlight. We got to see more lions in the afternoon, and could even spot (with binoculars) three cubs playing in the brush under a tree, where they had been left with stern admonitions to stay there and be good while the lionesses hunted.
The night drive was disappointing. We got to check a few more animals off our list—hyenas (and even two pups) and a white-tailed mongoose, but an hour of the drive was spent seeing no animals at all, and the rest of it poorly seeing animals we had seen a lot of during the day. But it’s the night drives that are either the most interesting or the most dull, so we lost just one round in an otherwise winning game. (See, I can even toss in bad puns without breaking a sweat!)
I can’t do justice to all the animals we saw and I’m certainly not going to make you wade through all the pictures of elephants, lions, zebras, antelope, rhinos and giraffes I took. We did get to see the rhino graveyard and glimpe the last two living northern white rhinos. Fortunately, poaching is down to zero a year so the recent graves are from natural causes, include Sudan, the last male northern white rhino. With harvested sperm and eggs, Ol Pejeta is going to try surrogacy to keep the subspecies from going extinct.
I Didn’t Know This!
I knew birds have honeycomb bones to make them lighter, but I had no idea that elephant skulls are also honeycombed, to reduce the weight of this 6-beastie. Um, elephant legs are solid bones, but I bet you already guessed that.
Did we pay for all this the next morning with overly tired children? Yes. That morning began a 3-day streak of fighting over (5) charging cords between three children. Does the math work out? Yes, they each had at least one cord. Did that matter? No. No, it definitely had no bearing on the quarreling or the outcome. At first, I was very frustrated by this. Then I realized that the same idiotic rows happen between our youngers at home as well, so I might as well be dealing with it in Kenya as in the US.
Needopedia 