Thursday 8 August 2013

Day One ~ The Long Trek


We began yesterday at 2.30pm as we headed for the airport in Aberdeen. By 8pm Dutch time, we were in Amsterdam for our connecting flight with Kenya Airways to Nairobi. The flight went very smoothly, with the softest landing we have ever experienced in a long-haul flight and we arrived 25 minutes ahead of schedule. However, the visa queue in Nairobi was rather long, so it was after 7am local time when we finally got on the move. The road to Voi had light traffic for a change and we made good time. On an even more positive note, this is the first time we have not witnessed a serious accident on that road, although we did find a road-kill Serval about 15 kilometres south of Nairobi :-(

Not everything went right though, as Howard (aka Dumbass) forgot to check if the Safaricom dongle was in the laptop bag, so we do not have our internet dongle for uploading the blog. Fortunately he did have the foresight to purchase a 50GB data roaming bundle just in case of dongle connection problems like last year, so all is not lost. We have arranged with our friend, Tiju to purchase one from her shop when we exit Tsavo East National Park on Thursday.

By the time we got to Tsavo, we were both exhausted and just did a quick circuit of Kanderi Swamp, where we saw Elephants, Grant's Gazelle, Warthog, Waterbuck and Impala.

We have decided this year, as it is just the two of us for the first time since 2006, we would have a little luxury, so we are spending four nights in the Ndololo Safari Camp, next to the public campsite where we normally pitch our tents.

We had a short walk around the camp with the Askari and paid a visit to the public campsite, where we found the anti-snare team from Care For The Wild Kenya. We donated a GPS to these guys last year, so it was great to hear how it is being put to good use. It was quite shocking, however, to see how many snares they are dealing with on a daily basis. Howard then had another brainwave and decided to donate our night vision monocular for their night-ambush work.

Handing over the Night-Vision Monocular to the guys from Care For The Wild Kenya


By the time we had eaten dinner, we were both exhausted and just wanted to sleep but we promised a blog, so here it is.

Good night!

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