Following the post on Egypt, I'll be talking about some of the major items that I remember about Kenya, both good and bad. Six months is a relatively long time for remembering details, but they stick around longer on particularly special events.

Many of my best memories still come from the Mara Bush Camp.  It was our first stop and our most rugged one, too.  It's a real, moving camp that gets set up in a different location yearly.  There was no power to speak of in the tents, except for a battery to keep some LED bulbs powered for night use. This probably helped give it some lasting impact.

At the end of the day, we often all gathered in a lounge in the dining tent (there were some power plugs there) and all had either Tusker or Amarula.  It was one of the few times during the day that we could actually just relax.  Outside of that, we were usually out and about taking pictures and roaming around on the dirt roads, keeping an eye out for critters.  This turned out to be particularly tiring.  That's part of why there weren't daily blog entries from that time.

During one of our outings, we had a great encounter with a number of baby lion cubs.  There were lots of other vehicles around, but that didn't seem to bother any of the lions.  They pride had various lions about to watch for food and threat, but the vehicles clearly weren't considered a threat.  They walked right in the middle of the autos and even very close to us.  They were so amazingly cute.  Laurie got some great pictures and we may have even gotten some good video (sure, it's been 6 months, but that doesn't mean we've had time to go through all of our media).

After the Mara Bush Camp, we headed over to Fig Tree, which wasn't far away and allowed us similar routes during our drives.  Sitting in the tree patio drinking Tusker, avoiding the monkeys, and watching animals out on the plains are my main memories here.  In fact, I almost forgot about them before I went looking through the pictures again.

After we left the Masai Mara, we stayed in Amboseli.  My main memories of here were of lots of elephants and mosquitos.  It was very odd that our previous camp, which was right on a river, had no mosquitos but in a permanent structure, there were tons of mosquitos.   We got to see lots of elephants, including many baby elephants. 

Our next adventure was a high-speed convoy between Amboseli and Tsavo.  Supposedly, there had been previous conflict in the area which led to a weapons build-up.  We weren't allowed to leave Amboseli without being part of the convoy.  For most people, this wasn't a problem since they weren't driving themselves.  We, however, were the only people who were self-driving.  Although it was worth it and no one bothered us about it, it wasn't normal. 

The drive itself was uneventful until we missed our turn-off to Finch Hatton's and got ourselves in to some sharp volcanic rock that we could have avoided.  This gave us a flat that we had to deal with at the gate.  Some people tried to help us with the jack, but it wasn't until someone came up that was familiar with how to fix a dust-caked one that we got it working.  It worked as we thought, but being front mounted it got the brunt of the dust and thus got all muddle up.  Everyone was very helpful though and gave us better directions to backtrack and get in to Finch Hatton's.

Finch Hatton's itself was absolutely wonderful and is probably my best memory of the whole trip even though we were there alone.  It was certainly the best place that we stayed.  Our tent was right over a water hole with lots of hippos and crocs.  We're hoping to return soon. ;)

The final memory, which still lingers on many of our bags, was the massive amount of dust that was kicked up in many areas.  Even with all of the windows and hatches closed, the car would not seal and would fill with dust that got all over and inside of absolutely everything, including out lungs.  We can see the color of the dust on many of our bags still.  It was truly permeating.

Unlike our feeling for Egypt, where even now we don't want to go back, we've been wanting to go back to Kenya since.  That said, we never truly felt all that well while we were there.  We were taking all the various medications and such, but whether it was from different food, too much dust, general fatigue, or something worse, we were always not feeling quite right.  Maybe next time we go we can spend longer to get more adjusted to the climate and food.

Posted by Shane on March 13, 2007 8:19 AM | Permalink