The one where we all had to push … twice
Word to your mother (also to my mother - hi Mum!) - Jen here again (Sara says “hello, how do, I’m well thanks, hi Mom”). The first week on the truck is now done and we’re having a cracking time so far. In a surprise to no one who’s been there, Kenya is a stunning country with extremely friendly people, lush green vegetation (at least currently during rainy season) and much too sticky mud! But I’m getting ahead of myself - strap yourself in because this is probably going to be a long one!
Day 1
We’re up early today for breakfast and to get the final bits and pieces ready for the real start of our epic adventure before heading down to reception. We’re met there by Manache (Nash), our tour leader, who takes us to meet Pluto, the big, yellow Absolute Africa truck and Steve, its driver, who together will drive us through 10 African countries over the coming months. With our bags safely stowed, we climb into the truck and meet Jamila and Stefan (USA) and Sam (AUS) who’ll be with us until Victoria Falls and Cape Town respectively. The truck starts up and we’re officially on our way to South Africa (via many, many other places first)!
The first stop is the Wildebeest Eco Camp to collect the rest of the day 1 / week 1 passengers, and 11 people join us on the truck. We quickly learn that there should actually have been 12 pick-ups there but one person, Shelly, missed her flight (from Australia - yikes!) and will join us later in the day. With all accounted for, we head through Nairobi traffic to the Giraffe Centre and are each handed a bag of food to feed the two giraffes currently out (Daisy and Betty) which we do first by hand and then by holding the pellets between our lips so that the giraffes “kiss” us to get at the food. Fun fact: giraffe slobber is both antibacterial and thick! We then have a short presentation and learn: how to tell the difference between the three types of giraffe in Kenya (Rothschild Giraffes, Maasai Giraffes, and Reticulated Giraffes); that warthogs (which in Swahili is pumba!) have a memory span of only 45 seconds, so every day really is a new day to the warthog; and just how heavy a giraffe tibia is (spoiler alert - it’s really very heavy).
Sara making friends with Betty the Rothschild giraffe
With our giraffe food supplies exhausted and our knowledge banks expanded, we’re off to our next stop of the day, The Sheldrick Elephant & Rhino Sanctuary. For anyone interested in the history of the sanctuary, we can recommend the book An African Love Story by Daphne Sheldrick, which tells the story of the life of Daphne Sheldrick and how she came to set up the orphanage. The sanctuary is only open for an hour a day to avoid the animals becoming too familiar with humans other than their immediate care-givers, and the hour is committed to teaching visitors about the key threats to wild elephant populations (principally humans), how we can help to limit those threats, and how we can help the orphanage to continue to care for the baby and young elephants in order to be able to reintroduce them to the wild once they’re old enough. During this presentation, many of the baby elephants are feeding and mudding (Louis Litt style) in an area in front of us and occasionally wander close enough for us to touch them. A particular highlight was when a wild warthog gate-crashed the presentation by barrelling into the feeding area, stealing the thunder of the baby elephants for a short while.
Baby elephants playing at The Sheldrick Elephant & Rhino Sanctuary
Once our hour is up (now 12 noon), we head to a local mall which has a Carrefour (turns out that’s not only in Western Europe!) and we’re instructed to get some lunch for today plus the next four, and enough water to sustain us for the same period. Readers will be delighted to hear that, not only did we buy the items instructed, but I also managed to find a new (albeit less good) neck pillow to replace the one stolen by Addis Ababa airport. From the mall, we head to our first campsite, Karen Camp, and get the excellent news that we’re all being housed in dorms instead of tents due to the expected downfall, and also the fact a tree had fallen on a (thankfully uninhabited) tent a few days earlier. Better still, by good fortune and not committing to a room too soon, Sara and I manage to score the only two person dorm room available in the camp.
The rain begins and it’s quite something! Everyone gathers under the veranda and we learn that our fellow travellers are: Mike and Luke, brothers from Blackpool, Emily from Newcastle, and Rich from Bristol (but living in London); Shelly (now arrived), Ryan and Taylor (AUS); Toby (USA); Ted and Lisette (Netherlands); Melissa (France); and Bettina (Venezuela but living in Switzerland). People will join and leave over the weeks, and while seven will be with us all the way to Cape Town, some others will be leaving after three weeks on Boxing Day. We spend some time beginning to get to know everyone before hitting the hay for an early start the next day.
Day 2
It’s an early start and a cereal breakfast before we set out on a 7 hour drive to the Maasai Mara National Park. After a very slow exit from Nairobi (both the driving and the roads are like nothing we’ve ever experienced before!), we drive for a couple of hours and stop off at the viewpoint for the Great Rift Valley. This is something we’ve been really excited for, but the view, unfortunately, does not live up to expectations by virtue of the thick fog entirely obscuring the view. For a fleeting moment, the fog clears slightly and we see a hint of the hidden green valley, but by the time we’ve blinked it’s gone again.
Introducing the viewpoint of The Great Rift Valley
As we drive on, we see vendor after vendor dotted along the roadside selling toasted maize, and OMG GUYS, GUYS THERE’S A BABOON AT THE SIDE OF THE ROAD, NO TWO BABOONS, LOOK THERE’S THE ALPHA, NO IT’S MORE THAN TWO BABOONS AND THERE ARE BABIES TOO, OH MY GOSH THERE ARE ACTUAL BABOONS RIGHT THERE!
There are similar reactions to the ostrich and zebras, and even more so to the lions chasing gazelle (which we quickly realise were in fact dogs, not lions) on the drive to our campsite, and excitement is high for our evening game drive when we arrive at Oldoropoi Camp. We set up our tents for the first time after a demo from Nash, and then it’s straight into 4x4s for our first ever safari.
Our vehicle has me and Sara (obviously) plus Mike, Luke, Sam, Shelly, Ted, and Melissa. With exactly 8 seats available, it’s a bit squashed, and we’re disappointed to find out that our roof is broken and we can’t therefore stand up (we find this out after Dalton, our driver, tells us it’s broken but we can try, and it slams suddenly closed as we’re driving a little later, thankfully not while anyone was standing under it). We head to the Maasai Mara park and are immediately caught by how beautiful, green and lush the landscape is, and Dalton quickly makes up for the roof shortcoming by taking us off the trails to see a mother cheetah and her fluffy little cubs up close. All is forgiven, Dalton!
Over the game drive, we see: zebra, Maasai giraffes, cheetah, topi, Cape buffalo, wildebeest, impala, and antelope. Then Dalton tears off at some pace and we’re not sure exactly why, but within a matter of minutes we find ourselves stopped at the side of the road not more than 3m from two relaxing male lions who are entirely unconcerned by our awed presence and “O” shaped mouths.
We marvel at the lions for quite a while as the sun sets in the background and as the park closure time, 18:30, approaches, we think this is quite the climax for our first game drive. However, we’re not quite done, and as we’re heading back Dalton tears off again in a different direction and we’re taken to five brother cheetahs in the process of eating a topi they’ve just killed.
With that, we head out of the park 40 minutes after closure, elated, tired and excited for the next day’s drives. The three 4x4 groups share stories of sightings over a local Kenyan meal of beef, greens and ugali prepared by Nash, and Nash then splits us into chore groups for the remainder of our time on the truck. The chores we rotate through daily are: cooking (breakfast and dinner); washing up (breakfast and dinner); security (ensuring the truck is locked and no items have been left behind when we vacate a campsite); and truckies (i.e. truck cleaning crew). Sara and I are on truckies with Rich, Sam and Ted, who’ll be our chore crew until we leave the truck (which for Rich, Sam and us is right until the very end) and get everything cleaned up before heading for bed.
Big 5 count: 2 of 5 achieved - Lion and Cape buffalo. Not yet seen: elephant, rhino and leopard.
Day 3
It’s another early start today and we head out at 7am on an all day game drive. Shelly and Ted have relocated into a different 4x4, which means we have much more space and a more comfortable spread of humans in the vehicle. Even better than that though is that Dalton, all around legend that he is, has fixed the roof overnight so we can now stand up to get a better view of the animals we encounter. We head back to the park and over the course of the morning we see several new animals, including jackals, serval cats, and mongeese on their mound.
The weather is glorious but the ground is muddy in places, and we’ve seen various other vehicles, including ones containing our fellow travellers, getting stuck in the mud. We, however, haven’t yet been stuck, and we’re feeling pretty smug about things as we drive over the savannah when the car in front of us (with others from our group) gets stuck in some pretty innocuous looking mud, and we quickly follow suit. Dalton gets out of our car to help the other car’s driver, George, and Dalton manages to get that car out of the mud fairly quickly with the assistance of the car’s passengers pushing. He then returns to our car but can’t unstick it, and no matter how we try we can’t get the car out of the mud. Time passes and at last another vehicle arrives. It’s the last car with our group in it and they’ve been called back to help us. Their driver, Peter, has a cable, and we attach it to both cars. The engines start up, Peter tightens the rope and pulls at our car, but with a giant SNAP the cable breaks and we’re back where we started with no hope of getting out of the mud.
More time passes, heads are scratched, engines revved, and skin is burned (mostly Rich’s), before eventually another car arrives with another cable. It’s attached to our car and Peter’s and this time lots of us take up position at the front of the car to help push it backwards out of the mud. The engine starts up again, the cable tightens and we heeeeave against the car and SUCCESS - an hour and a half after getting stuck the car is finally free!
Stuck in the mud: part 1
All three cars head off in convoy to a large savannah plain with zebra, various types of antelope, and a tortoise I spot ambling across the grass, where we stop for a picnic lunch. It’s an odd thought that we’re happily out of the cars in an African national park, unconcerned about the fact there might be predators nearby contemplating which of the topi near to us might make a good dinner, but nonetheless we are, and we enjoy lunch under a beautiful lonely tree.
After lunch we’re back in the cars and make our way to the Mara river to see the hippos. Again, we’re merrily out of the cars despite having seen two sister lionesses lounging a short distance away on our drive to the river. Before spotting the hippos we hear them as they surface to expel air and inhale more, and then we see them, giant pinky-purplish heads (and some smaller ones - baby hippos - yay!) briefly breaking the surface before going below again. It was incredible the number of them in such a short section of river.
Photo credit: Shelly Glaizner @rosey_dayz
Back in the vehicles, we see three more lionesses a short distance from the river and are able to get right up close to them. Then Dalton asks us whether we’d prefer to try to see a leopard or elephants, and as the leopard is rare to spot we plump for that. Dalton, as always, delivers, and we find ourselves some time later facing a leopard asleep in a tree - a huge tick off Sara’s wish list (see a large cat in a tree - done!).
Soon after we leave the leopard, we spot some elephants through the trees and follow one of the trails to get a better view of them. It’s a pretty decent sized herd and we have a great view of them amongst the trees and foliage.
Over the course of the day, we realise it’s baby time in the Maasai Mara, both seeing and making. We see a pair of amorous antelopes, some saucy serval cats, and a lusty lion and lioness. The lion and lioness in particular seem to enjoy an audience and give us a show to remember.
We’re all buzzing as we head back to camp for the night, with Dalton’s words that we’re a lucky group ringing in our ears. Despite the rains that have hammered the plains for the 10 days prior to our arrival, the weather’s been perfect for us so far, and we’ve seen the elusive leopard without too much difficulty at all. Tired and happy, we head to bed early in advance of a very early morning on the (entirely metaphorical) hunt for rhino!
Big 5 count: 4 of 5 seen - Lion, Cape buffalo, elephant and leopard. Not yet seen: rhino.
Day 4
So when I said other days were early starts, it turns out my sense of what constitutes early was wrong. Today we’re picked up at 5:45am for an early morning game drive to try to see a rhino, and Dalton is under no illusions about how much we want to complete the Big 5. All three cars are working together, and we go to a new part of the park where rhino are more often seen and split up. We diligently scour the tree line and bushes for a rhino but to no avail, and when the three trucks get together again we’ve all been equally unsuccessful. The hunt continues in a different part of the park and a couple of hours pass with only sightings of the now “usual” zebra, warthogs, gazelles etc, plus a mama cheetah with her seven cubs, when Dalton suddenly goes on alert. “Rhino” he says, and we’re immediately on edge, searching for the rhino he says he sees. Moments later, there it is on the hill, a black rhino munching on nearby bushes. We’re all absolutely delighted and exchange awed and excited looks as the rhino gently makes its way up the hill. Eventually we leave, made up to have completed the Big 5 within the Maasai Mara alone with many safaris still to come over the trip.
On the way back out of the park, we find four cheetah breakfasting on a gazelle right at the roadside - we’re basically in a National Geographic show! - which completes our Maasai Mara experience. It’s been an incredible few days in the park and we feel beyond lucky to have seen the things we’ve seen so close up.
Back at camp, it’s a pretty quick breakfast before we wave goodbye to the Maasai Mara and drive to Maji Moto, a Maasai cultural camp, where we’re staying for the night. We’re welcomed by some of the local Maasai tribesmen and women with a combination of song, dance, and a display of the iconic jumping which we’ll never forget.
We set up camp under some spectacular candelabra euphorbia and acacia trees and head up to the central area to find out what activities await us. We learn from Rose, one of the best Maasai English speakers in the camp, that in Swahili, Maji means water and Moto means fire or hot, and that the camp has been so named for the natural hot springs nearby which sustains the camp and local tribespeople (and gives us hot showers!). We’re taken by Rose and fellow Maasai tribesmen Benson and Salaton (the chief) to the hot springs and I, after being pulled into the shallow water in sandals by Salaton, can confirm they are most definitely scaldy hot!
Unfortunately the rain then starts and the afternoon’s activities are put on hold. We’re taken instead to the beautiful Maasai lodge designed by Salaton to wait out the rain, and have the opportunity to speak to some of the Maasai about their lives and experiences. Once the rain clears, we’re briefly able to attempt some spear throwing and jumping with the Maasai (spoiler alert: our efforts were collectively pretty poor and objectively nothing compared to the Maasai tribesmen’s), and to see them fire-starting in the traditional way, before Sara and I are called back in on cooking duties.
Photo credit: Jamila Smith-Dell @jam.ila www.preparefortake-off.com
After tea, there’s more time to spend with the Maasai learning about their lives, and we’re also given some of their local brew to sample (made from agave, orange cotton leaf, and honey which is then fermented in a giant gourd). It all feels a bit surreal being here, and we head to bed excited for seeing more of the Maasai’s traditions and day to day lives in the morning.
Day 5
Sara and I (and Sam) are up 5:30am again this morning to go to milk the cows with the Maasai women, and just after 6am we’re collected by Salaton, Rose and Benson to be taken to what we’ll later learn is the women’s village to try some cow milking. All good and well, except the cow I’m allocated doesn’t like me one bit and kicks at me in disgust, narrowly missing my shin at one point. Sara’s cow, meanwhile, has no such problem with her (although this is more likely than not because Sara listened properly when the Maasai women told us to keep ourselves out of the cows’ eyelines as they’d likely reject non-Maasai attempts to milk them) and was able to get a thin stream of milk into her cup. I’m then reallocated to the same cow and have more success, this time making every effort to stay invisible to the cow, and I’m feeling pretty pleased with my milking efforts when the Maasai woman hiding me from the cow takes over and I see how paltry my efforts really are by comparison with hers. Once we’re all done, Salaton invites us to try the milk we’ve just taken, and we tentatively put the cups to our lips, well aware of our weak western stomachs and reliance on the pasturisation process to remove nasties from milk before we drink it. The milk is sweeter than we expect and we each have a tiny taste before handing the cups back for Salaton to finish off.
Back at the lodge, everyone is up and we have breakfast before setting out on a walk to see the local Maasai village’s school and arrive there to realise it’s both Sunday and the summer holidays, so there are no kids and the school is closed. A bit disappointed, it’s back up the hill and we’re taken to the women’s village to see how some of the tribeswomen live. In Maasai culture, men can take multiple wives and often take much younger brides, and when the man dies, the women cannot remarry. These widowed women are then moved to the women’s village to live out the rest of their lives and are expected to build their own house there with the help only of any female children they may have (male children are not permitted to assist). We meet some of the women, some of whom look much too young to be there (certainly they’re younger than we are) and are shown inside one of their houses, which is made from wood, mud and cow dung. It’s sparse, with no furnishings and only one main room, plus a hallway and small second room which is used to house each woman’s calves overnight. There are two beds, one small and hard with no pillow for the woman living there, and one larger and hard with no pillow for visitors including newly arrived women to the village who’ve yet to build their own house. Seeing how basic and humble these women’s lives are brings home how privileged we are in the west, and the excess we have but don’t see as such.
Outside, the women have set up some blankets showing the jewellery, ornaments and artefacts they’ve made, and we buy a few things, including a bracelet each in traditional Maasai colours, a star ornament for our planned travel tree (a Christmas tree we intend to decorate annually with ornaments we get from each country on our travels), and some earrings for Sara’s mum.
The Maasai women’s village. Film credit: Sara Riley
We thank the women for allowing us to see their homes and how they live and head back to the lodge thinking it’s time to pack up and leave. Not so, however, as it turns out we’re now to be warrior trained (my time to shine!). We’re each given a Maasai shield and piece of reed-like succulent plant, and we’re split into two opposing teams. Unsure what to do, my team looks quizzically around at each other when out of nowhere we’re suddenly under attack, with reed-like succulent sticks flying through the air at us! We defend ourselves with our shields and hurl the sticks back, aiming to hit the opposing team members. We each have Maasai on our teams, who’re giggling and throwing the sticks with gusto back at the opposition, and this goes on until Rose calls time on the fight. It’s declared that we’ve all passed warrior training and are now Maasai warriors! As soon as we’re home, we’re updating our CVs to Jen Whatcott, BSc, ACA, PRINCE2, Maasai Warrior and Sara Riley, BSc, MA, Maasai Warrior!
Now it really is time to pack up and leave, and with heavy hearts we bid farewell to our Maasai hosts and the beautiful land they call home. We have a bit of a drive today to Lake Naivasha and Nash has said he’d like us to be there by 4pm. This should be entirely achieveable, but as Rabbie Burns said, “the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agly” and if you remember the title of this blog, it’s the one where we had to push twice, so you can probably guess what’s coming. Around 20 minutes into the drive as we’re navigating the mud track between Maji Moto and the main road some kilometres away, we hit a long patch of deep sticky mud and the truck gets well and truly stuck. The short version of the following is that it takes three hours to get free; involves heroic efforts from Nash and Steve and many of the passengers who dig the wheels out of the truck multiple times, lay traction tracks multiple times, push and heave at the back of the truck multiple times; has multiple other cars unrelated to us also getting stuck in the mud either trying to pass us on the road or drive past on the surrounding land, all of which was boggy marsh; and eventually requires another truck to pull the front of our vehicle while the back tyres are on the traction tracks and around 10-12 of us push from the back to get out of the mud. Unsurprisingly, there is much sunburn of the Brits in particular later that day.
Finally on the road again, we head for Lake Naivasha, eventually getting to our campsite, Crescent Camp, just after 18:30. What a day!
Day 6
Today Sara and I (and no one else!) are doing a bicycle safari of Hell’s Gate National Park, which is I think the only national park where you can ride rather than visit in a vehicle. We’re collected at 8:20am by our guide Chris and driver Moses and are driven to the entrance to the park where we collect our bikes. We’re half amused, half concerned by the sign on one of the buildings warning us about local baboons.
We ride through Elsa Gate to enter the park, and one of the first things we see as we ride is Fischer’s Tower, a volcanic plug which was the inspiration for Pride Rock in the Lion King, and Sara and I almost pop with delight when we’re told this. We dismount and walk around the rock and Chris points out some Rock Hyrax to us. Neither of us has ever heard of the Rock Hyrax but Chris tells us they’re one of the only two living relatives of the elephant (despite the fact they look nothing alike) and they share similar DNA as well as a very long gestation period relative to body size.
Back on the bikes, we see Grant gazelle, Thompson’s gazelle, hartebeest (another previously unheard of creature), impala antelope, warthogs, eland, social weavers, Marshall eagles, vultures, guinea fowl (locally known as baby-wakers for the impact of their song), many, many zebra, baboon menaces, and some truly stunning scenery along the way.
Around halfway to our destination, we spot two Maasai giraffe not too far away, and Chris tells us to leave our bikes and (illegally) takes us off the track to see how close we can get to them. He stays behind while Sara and I walk slowly and gently towards them, and it’s a real moment for us sharing such intimate space with the wild giraffes before we leave them to their lunch and return to the bikes.
Chris then asks us if we’ve heard of the Small 5, the Ugly 5, and the Forgotten 5. We haven’t, and he explains that the Small 5 are small creatures with the names of Big 5 animals in their name; the Ugly 5 are, predictably, unattractive animals; and the Forgotten 5 are animals many consider should be in the Big 5 (if only the number 5 weren’t so unhelpfully inflexible). These new categories contain the following animals:
Small 5: leopard tortoise; elephant shrew; rhinoceros beetle; lion ant; and white headed buffalo weaver
Ugly 5: wildebeest; warthog; hyena; baboon; marabou stork
Forgotten 5: giraffe; cheetah; hippo; eland; gorilla
We’re doing pretty well on Ugly and Forgotten 5 animals as it turns out, but terribly on the Small 5 (possibly the tortoise we saw was a leopard tortoise but I’m not going to count it as we can’t be sure). With that in mind, I’ll now add those fives to the rolling counts:
Small 5 count: 0 of 5. Not yet seen: any of them!
Ugly 5 count: 3 of 5 - wildebeest; warthog; baboon. Not yet seen: hyena and marabou stork.
Forgotten 5 count: 4 of 5 - giraffe; cheetah; hippo; eland, Not yet seen: gorilla.
Chris also tells us that warthog in Swahili is pumba (which we knew) and that the literal translation of the word pumba is “stupid” on account of their short memory and resulting tendency when fleeing from danger to forget why they’re running, leading to them either stopping or turning back towards the predator. Poor simple pumba!
We eventually reach the rest stop after nearly 10km of riding and find another sign warning us about the baboons.
We spot some black faced vervet monkeys (including some playful babies) before setting out on a short walk to see, from a distance, the gorge which was the inspiration for the landscape in Lion King where Scar commits fratricide on the wonderful Mufasa by causing the stampede (I’m still not over it).
The rain starts as we return to the rest stop and collect our bikes, and although the land dampens, our spirits don’t as we ride back the way we came, seeing still more zebra (or possibly the same ones as earlier), warthogs and baboons, and eventually land back at Elsa Gate to return our bikes.
Back at camp, it’s a gentle afternoon without much to report other than that a few of us took a wander down to Lake Naivasha to see the lake and on the way we were warned of the terrifying animals in the vicinity…
Lake Naivasha is beautiful. The marabou storks we see there, bless them, are not (I’m sure their mothers think they’re beautiful but we both completely agree that they’re more than worthy of a place on the Ugly 5).
Before bed, Sara and I decide to take another wander down to the lake to see if we can see some hippos out of the water (they only come out at night to eat 80kg of grass each before sunlight). So that we could live through the experience to tell the tale, Nash suggests we ask a security guard to escort us to make sure we don’t end up on the wrong side of a hippo. Being the thoroughly risk-averse adventurers that we are, we take his advice and a lovely man from reception accompanies us down to the lake again, providing hippo related facts and anecdotes, and we learn that only a week or so earlier there was a person killed by a hippo nearby, and that a couple of years earlier the camp we’re staying at woke to find a lost hippo in the swimming pool. Unfazed, we continue onwards and our guide takes us to a couple of men by the lakeside who have a giant flashlight, and they in turn take us to an area safely segregated from the lake by electric wire. They turn on the torch and there on the grass not more than 10m from us are three hippo quietly grazing along with some waterbuck. Given that it’s pitch black other than a flashlight, we aren’t able to take any good photos of the hippos out of water, but we do luckily get a few terrible ones to record the experience.
Day 7
We set our alarms early today because our guide last night told us that we might be able to see hippos in daylight before they went back into the lake at around 6am. Sam, Mike, Luke, Shelly and Rich also join us in the hopes of being able to see hippos, but alas we’re too late as they’re back in the water around an hour before we arrive.
We pack up camp as we’re off today to our next destination, Lake Nakuru, where tomorrow we’ll be on an all day game drive. En route to the lake, we stop off at an orphanage called Amazing Grace Children’s Home to hear about the work they do in rescuing children from abusive families. The orphanage was set up by a local woman called Margaret when she was 21 and it currently has around 16 children between 4 and 18 years old (the 18 year olds are allowed to stay by special court order for a transitional period until they’re able to live by themselves). Given the focus on children being abused at home, there’s a real need to have community buy-in to the initiative to help identify the children in need and to extract them from an abusive situation (there’s very limited state support). We’re pleased to hear that Kenya doesn’t allow international adoption, local adoption is becoming much less taboo than it has been in the past, there’s a six month screening and bonding period as part of the adoption process, and the children do have a say in the prospective families they’re placed with before any adoption is formalised.
We play Simon Says with the children (I’m embarrassingly terrible at it; Sara’s much better) and are taught a simple song in Swahili and accompanying dance before we have to leave.
From the orphanage, it’s onwards to Lake Nakuru and our campsite, Punda Millia, which means zebra in Swahili. When we arrive, we’re shown some upgrade options, and Sara and I decide to go for a bunda, a standalone one-room chalet type building with two beds, two chairs, electricity and a balcony set back in amongst the trees, euphorbia, cacti and other foliage. It’s an oddly discordant thing we’ve found in Kenya that there’s lush green landscape and an abundance of rain (in the rainy season) and yet lots of cacti and succulents you’d normally expect to see in arid / desert landscapes.
Our Banda at Punda Millia campsite, Lake Naivasha, Kenya
The campsite itself is stunningly beautiful, and we worry again that we’re being spoiled with wonderful camping facilities and are headed for an almighty disappointment at some point. But that’s a problem for Future Jen and Sara, and Present-Day Jen and Sara instead enjoy a relaxing afternoon and a couple of drinks before an early bed.
Thus completes our first week on the truck. Tune in next time for more from our African adventure if you haven’t already had enough of our exceptionally long blog (which is likely to shorten over time as it’s taken ages to write all of this!).