Amboseli Arrival

We flew from Cape Town to Nairobi with a forty-five minute stopover in Livingstone, Zambia.

Sometimes our local contacts are able to meet us inside the airport. When that's not possible we have to face a crowd of shouting guides and drivers at the exit that make me feel like a celebrity navigating a horde of paparazzi.

We spent the night at a hotel in Nairobi. The next day was Halloween! Alice was very excited that she had come up with a very appropriate costume she could do from what we had with us. She borrowed her dad's drawstring shorts to dress up as Martin Kratt, from The Wild Kratts, an animated show about two real-life brothers who have animal adventures around the world.

Our guide, Tom, picked us up early and we set out on the five hour drive to Amboseli National Park. We arrived just in time for lunch and checked into our cottage with three beds that felt like something from Goldilocks.

My first time sleeping with mosquito netting.

After a nap we set out on a sunset game drive in the park.

While we waited for Tom to arrange our entry to the park we saw this vervet monkey standing around.

Inside the park we started spotting animals. Some, like the impala, were familiar from MalaMala.

Others were new, like the tiny Thompson’s Gazelle.

The scale of the park is much grander than the MalaMala Reserve, and much more open. When we spotted zebra, it wasn't one or two, but thirty or fifty. They were often interspersed with wildebeests and Tom said that they look to the zebras as leaders.

The giraffes here are Masai giraffe, which seem a little shorter and darker than the southern giraffe we saw earlier in the week. Tom says that they have interesting commonalities with humans: they have the same number of vertebrae that we do, their teeth are the same (cutting teeth at the front and grinding molars at the back) and they see the same way we do.

We made our way out to the lake, where we saw this mother and baby elephant wading through the shallow water. Wherever there are elephants, there are egrets, who eat the bugs elephants disturb as they graze.

In a drier field nearby there was a pride of lionesses just waking up for the evening.

Big stretch!

Turning back toward the water we saw several hippos, including two having a bit of a spat.

In the swamp we drove quite close to a buffalo, happily muddy and cool.

Speaking of which, we had expected much higher temps from the long-term forecast, but the high was only in the mid-70s. Tom says this is quite cold for this time of the year, but it makes us quite happy. The recent rain has also settled the dust, which is good to hear, since it still seems quite dusty to us, especially when other trucks pass us in the dirt roads. Those are pretty exciting at times. All the roads are rocky; the good ones are only washboarded, while many have deep pits and puddles. During the day they truck in piles of dirt and at night crews work to shovel them into the worst patches.

But back to the animals! Here are a couple of grey-crowned cranes with their crowns looking golden in the light. They are the national bird of Uganda.

We also saw this fierce looking martial eagle, Africa's largest. Tom says they have been known to knock down full-grown men who got in their way.

On our drive from Nairobi, Tom said “You can see the mountain,” and after looking much higher in the sky than we imagined, we could just discern the snow-covered peak of Mount Kilimanjaro amid the clouds. But throughout the afternoon the clouds cleared and we got this glorious view as the sun dropped toward the horizon.

The flamingos on the lake seemed like a reflection of the sky.

We were one of the last trucks exciting the park. As we raced back to the gate as fast as the roads permitted, we got to see some of the nocturnal hunters coming out.

A hyena with somewhere to be raced past us.

Our first jackal!

Back at the lodge it was time for dinner. All the meals here are served buffet style with a wide variety of options presided over by the beaming chef.

After dinner each night there is a Masai dance performance around a bonfire near the dining hall. They perform three dances, including a jumping competition.

Jason let them pull him up to participate and did his best, but his boots definitely weighed him down. I’m still happy to keep him!

The music contrasts a low, rhythmic chanting with high-pitched yells. When the performance ended, a chorus of frogs took up the theme from a nearby pond and sang us to sleep.