Blogs from Lake Nakuru NP, Rift Valley Province, Kenya, Africa - page 5

We nearly cancelled our plans to come to Nakuru after we heard on the news on Wednesday that 2 people had died in the area - likely either owing to Ebola or the Great Rift Valley Disease (we know the first one's not good, but had never heard of the second one)...also that the place was flooded from all the recent rain. However, as the trip would be our main one during our time in Nairobi and we had both been looking forward to it, we decided to come anyway. Arrived in Nakuru yesterday after a 3 hour drive...1&1/2hours of it along very bumpy road! Staying in a roof top room in a 'hotel' - very basic, and 10 flights of stairs to get to it, but good view of the town below. Visited the Meningai ... read more

After the morning game drive we headed towards Lake Nakuru, stopping off at a Masai Village. This was the tourist stop. The Masai welcomed us into the village by doing the jumping in the air dance with lots of grunting and whooping, then proceeded to show us around the village. Inside the outer fence there is another fenced compound where they keep their cattle and goats to stop them being eaten/stolen. In the middle of this is one of the trees that the Masai and the locals use to keep away mozzies and as a treatment for Malaria by boiling the leaves and drinking the the tea. They also use the twigs from the tree to clean their teeth, (this wasn't just something they told the tourists, we saw loads of people doing it) by whittling ... read more

Awhile back (2 months - yes I have been slacking on my blog updates!) I took my first safari in Kenya to Lake Nakuru National Park with some friends from Kisumu. The park was initially established as a bird sanctuary and is Kenya’s first established rhino sanctuary and therefore has one of the largest concentrations of black rhino in the country (Nakuru is also home to white rhino). The park has 500 species of bird including 2 difference flamingo species whose populations can number up to 1.5 million at a time. The cats represented are lions, cheetahs, hyenas, leopards and jackals. Then of course there are baboons, zebras, giraffes, water buffalo and gazelles. Of this we saw everything except cats - but surely not every bird species. Despite some rain on the first day our game ... read more

Started the safari yesterday with an eventful morning - at the time we thought a suicide bomber had blown up part of Nairobi, so we had to get out of Nairobi pretty quickly! It turned out in the end to be a local gang member trying to kill police whose grenade went off in his pocket in a cafe by accident. Still pretty scary though! It was only a couple of streets away from my hotel (I didn't hear anything though). Travelled most of the day yesterday in the safari truck (an enormous yellow beast!) to get to a campsite close to the lake nakuru national park, with one short stop at nakuru town. The journey was really bumpy - much worse than a rough sea for about 2 hours, i thought the truck was actually ... read more

Sorry for being so lame with this blog malarky, time always seems so short when we even get time on tinternet but here is an epic blog entry for you and theres some pictures on debs facebook for you too. so heres a run down of whats been going on over the last few weeks. about 5/6 weeks ago we had opur mid project break. emma climbed kilimanjaro and a couple of people climed mt meru but we headed to the beach! we were heading to mombassa in kenya which involved a very cramped, hot, 10 hour journey on possibly the most frightening road in africa (according to the lonely planet guide book!) no toilet stops and 10000 biscuits later we arrived in mombassa almost without bags as debs was sure hers had definately fallen off ... read more