Family Trip, part 1
My family arrived in Kenya on August 13th and the following morning we set out on 7 days of safari. We chose, as is in my family’s tradition, to go “off the beaten path”. This meant that we skipped the biggest game parks (with the exception of Lake Nakuru which got added due to poor weather) and hit some of the smaller, but just as beautiful, parks instead. Given that this was a Schenk family trip we spent almost every night camping (real camping, not the fancy “safari” camping!) We went with a friend of our boss, Marco, who quickly became integrated into the gang and even tried valiantly to win a game of Wizard.
We began with a night on Lake Naivasha, took a beautiful boat ride, and saw lots of beautiful birds. Courtney is a budding, but avid, birder and took on the duty of identifying the hundreds (literally) of species of birds that we saw. (I was extremely grateful as now I won’t get admonished by Laura and Jason for not giving the bird photos their due print space!) Here is a Pied Kingfisher.
Next we headed off to Hell’s Gate outside of Naivasha. There we biked through the park to a large gorge. One of the few parks in Kenya that allows you out of your car, we were able to see zebras, giraffes and many other animals up close. Here’s Mark, Courtney and myself with some wildlife in the background.
After the bike ride we walked through a 1.5 km gorge with a small river running through it. The scenery was amazing but there were some particularly hairy stretches that required fancy footing and stretching across wide gaps. Fortunately we had a very capable Masai, Joseph, with us who know EXACTLY where each foot and hand should go. Adding to the complexity was the fact that at times the water was cold and at other times is was very, very hot. At the end Joseph took us to his village to learn a little about how the Masai live.
Our next stop was at Lake Nakuru which is best known for the thousands of flamingos that live on the lake. Below is a picture of some of them, but its hard to convey the sheer quantity of them. When looking down on the lake its looks more like some kind of pink algae bloom has covered the lake.
Our two most exciting sightings of the day were a rhinoceros (common to the park, but rare to us) and stripped hyena (rare all around). That night we camped next to a large waterfall in a “campground”. Here, a campground simply means a large space of grass. This probably doesn’t sound too weird to our camping friends, but when you’re in the middle of a park where they don’t let you out of the car at any point b/c of wild animals, it’s a little strange. Our biggest concern were the cape buffalo that are in the area. We created a barricade of a car and fallen tree around our tents so that the wandering buffalo wouldn’t accidentally trample us in the middle of the night. Knowing that they didn’t actually want to hurt us didn’t alleviate any of the fear that we all felt when one sauntered by us just before bed. Fortunately we all made it through the night without any incidents!
The next day we drove up to Lake Baringo, known for its huge population of birds. We were camping in a campground on the shores of the lake and there were so many birds everywhere you looked. We took a boatride on the lake and our captain helped us identify many different species. One of my favorite was this African Jakarta. There were tons of them running around on top of the water.
The second morning we took an early ride and were treated to an amazing sunrise.
Our last stop of the week was at Lake Bogoria where we had our most beautiful campsite of all. There were NO people, just stunning scenery, flamingos and the rare Greater Kudu. As usual, we were left in utter amazement (and gratitude) that there were so few people in a place that was so gorgeous.
Sadly the next morning we had to get up and drive all the way back to Nairobi. A sad end to a fabulous week!
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