Ok, so I know it has been an appallingly long time since I updated this but I thought - rightly or wrongly - you might all like to know that I'm still alive and well. There is now an almightly hole in this journal to the tune of 8 weeks or so covering the rest of Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, due to a slight technical glitch - 6 weeks where I managed to access the internet for aabout 6 hours in total, and had to use most of that time to apply for a job. I have written notes that I can later write blog entires from though, so it should all be complete (eventually), if a little out of order. Althought as I now have one of thse job things, and I'm luckily enough that it happens to be one I actually want - a year by the seaside in Margate doing paediatrics, respiratory medicine, urology & colorectal surgery, before heading to London for a year, for anyone who's interested and hasn't already heard me harping on about it - I suppose it wasn't a complete waste of time. So, excuses aside, welcome to the African portion of my travels!
For those of you who don't know my parents have decided to join me for short parts of my Gap year, and African is the continent they've both chosen to join me on, albeit at different times. So two weeks ago an exceptionally nervous Mom and a slightly nauseous (due to some lovely anti-malarials) I flew out to Nairobi. We arrived first thing in the morning after an overnight flight which involved very little sleeping, so after a taxi ride to the hotel and a mini tour of Nairobi, pointing out all the statues and really quite beautiful old buildings, as well as huge elephants amde out of old corrugated iron... we prompted spent the day in the hotel sleeping, eating and generally recovering! Our tour group turned out to be three mothers and three daughters, all around the same age, so we happily set off on our first leg of the journey to Lake Nakuru
Our little safari van - our home for the 3 days spent in Kenya - was essentially a 7 seater minibus where the roof popped up so you could view animals and take pictures without the less desirable parts of nature getting to you... y'know, being bitten/chased/eaten etc. It took around 5 hours to get to the first of our national parks, and other than a stop off to see the view of the Great Rift Valley - which was stunning, if overcrowded with people trying to sell us wooden giraffe statues - spent most of that time staring out of the window looking for wildlife. A few hours in we saw our first zebra and got ridiculously excited - closely followed by our first baboons, which live alongside the highway and scavenge from the waste throw out of windows by drivers; by the time we arrived we must have seen a few hundred at least, whole baboon families sat crouched in the shade of shrub bushes by the roadside.
We arrived to find our little tented camp all made up, lunch cooked, and happily amused ourselves sitting in the sun and chatting until our afternoon game drive. We only went out for a few hours, but we were lucky enough in that time to see white rhino - including a family with a little baby - wildebeest, and our first lions; three of the 'big five'. Not to mention herds of giraffe, who run so elegantly despite their gangley limbs (anyone who's seen me run will understand why I find this quite so amazing - I don't quite have 5' 8'' of me to deal with and that's already far too much for my limited coordination), and zebra too, who have this adorable habit of wrapping themselves in to eah other and resting their heads on each others backs; they look like they're having a cuddle and it's adorable. I got to appreciate quite how well camouflaged lions are as well - for a few minutes I thought we were just looking at a few zebra (who really couldn't be more noticeable if they tried - black and white stripes in a yellow and green terrain? Was evolution having a laugh?!) until with the help of my much loved telephoto lens realised I could see two sets of ears; and that was it! After another amazingly cooked meal, which put me to shame as anyone who can cook a delicious three course meal on a kerosene stove tends to - I really must learn to cook properly sometime soon... - the severe lack of nightlife sent us bed early, which considering no-one really seemed to sleep well was probably a good thing.
So we got up at 6.30am the next morning, bedraggled and sleep-deprived, to a freezing cold shower; every girls dream! Luckily we had a daily fix of caffeine and cooked breakfast so were in much higher spirits (or just delirious from lack of sleep) by the time we got in the minibus a few hours later and headed to the Masai Mara. The journey was fairly uneventful, just driving through lots of small rural towns and picking up water and snacks for the next few days before being stranded in the middle of nowhere. The closer we got the more we started to see Masai people, dressed in their bright blankets (red for the men, blue for the women) and colourful necklaces and earrings - then as we got more in to the wilderness seeing our first Masai villages from the roadside, mud huts surrounded by homemade stick fences to keep their cattle in and predators out; occasionally we'd run into a group of cattle on the road, up to a hundred being herded by men or boys with just two sticks to guide them - they looked half-starved though (both the cattle and the Masai if I'm being honest). The cattle have huge humps on their backs (fat deposits, if I remember GCSE biology correctly) but otherwise just look like skin and bones, and with the exception of the hump the people look much the same; they walk for miles and miles each day, and survive on a diet of milk, blood and meat, so they're incredibly lean. We stopped to help another safari vechicle that had gotten stuck in the mud just down the road from our campsite, and the local kids took the opportunity to run over to us and see if we had gifts - they got toothbrushes (Holly and her daughter Cherri, two Canadians on our tour, had been in Uganda doing missionary work before they joined us, and had been given 500 toothbrushes to give out whilst they were in Africa) and rubbers, and couldn't have looked happier about it.
So we made it to our campsite eventually, a permanent tented camp so we actually got beds! As well as our very own Masai security guards to protect us from wild animals at night - not sure if that was reassuring or not... As well as hot showers and real toilets, so it was quite a luxurious place really! I won't go through the details of every game drive we went on separately because I'm sure that's going to get very old very quickly (even we got pretty blase about half the animals in the end!) but instead just pick out the highlights from each place. From the Masai Mara it was two things really - lions and elephants. I have something of an obsession with the BBC's 'Big Cat Diary' and going to the Masai Mara was something of a dream come true, so I was pretty happy just to be there, but the lions we saw whilst we were there just made it for me - the first few we saw were surrounded by safari vechicles as they rested in the shade, which was a little sad to see, but the next group we saw was a group of mothers and cubs which were adorable. I was quite upset that we actually interuppted what might have been a succesful kill - we saw a lioness poised to run, and our driver took it upon himself to speed around to get a closer look, and in doing so gave the gazelle they were trying to catch a way to escape - but after that they all sat together, probably 8 or 10 lions in total, and it was nice to see them as a family. We were also lucky on our second day to spot a group of nomad lions (young male lions, too old to be part of the pride they were born in as they're a threat, but not yet old enough to challenge other males for their prides - I told you I loved Big Cat Diary!) whilst we were on our own, and spent the best part of 20 minutes just watching them rest in the shade; amazing. And as if that wasn't enough we saw a family of about 9 elephants on the hillside (they hate wet ground because they can't move in it easily, so they're always found on higher ground in the wet season - I really didn't expect to find elephants high up on hills but there you go!) including a few babies. So I was sad to leave but we had to go to Tanzania and the Serengeti, which wasn't a bad compromise.
Anyway, no internet time left so that's all for now! Look after yourselves and keep in touch.
Lots of Love,
Kat
xxx
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