On Safari in Amboseli National Park

After an afternoon of relaxing, it was time for our afternoon game drive. Mom was feeling the effects of having to get up at 5am and then get on a plane, so she decided it would be better to skip the afternoon activities and just rest, so I went without her. There are only two other people on this portion of the trip (a couple from Florida named Blake and Megan). They are very nice, and are around my age and we get along fine. We started off seeing a lot of the animals that we saw on our morning game drive: lots of elephants, zebras, wildebeest, etc. The first thing we saw that was kind of special was a wounded hyena. We are not sure how it got injured, but Dennis (our amazingly knowledgeable guide) thought it was probably swiped by a lion when it tried to scavenge something the lion killed. You can see the gash on its back left hip.



Dennis thought this hyena would probably not live much longer, because apparently hyenas will kill and eat each other when wounded like this... This is a spotted hyena, appropriately named due to the spots on its coat.

We saw giraffes in the wild for the first time, as well. We noticed that many of the animals had birds riding on their backs (or in the case of many of the giraffes, their necks), and when we asked Dennis about it, he said that the birds get a free ride while they are picking off ticks of the animals they are riding on. A mutually beneficial relationship. Here is my favorite picture I took of giraffes today:



I just love Mt. Kilimanjaro and the acacia trees in the background... These are Masai giraffes, which are a different species than the Rothschild giraffes we saw at the Giraffe Center in Nairobi.

As the sun started to set, Mt. Kilimanjaro really started to glow. The snow on the top turned pink. It was really a breath-taking sight.









As we were heading back to our lodge, we saw massive herds of zebra and wildebeest heading towards the ground where volcanic rock was more prevalent. Dennis said this was because they preferred to sleep there because the lions couldn't run as quickly on the volcanic rock, and so they felt safer. I would guess so...



After the game drive, we came back to the lodge and I took a shower to rinse off all the dust that had coated me throughout the day. We had dinner, and since it's another early morning tomorrow, we wanted to get to sleep early. That wasn't in the cards, though, because as we were turning off the lights to go to sleep, something shorted out our fan and all the lights in the room. We called the front desk and they sent someone to figure out what was wrong. After waiting about five minutes, a man showed up at the door and couldn't figure out what was wrong, so he said they were going to get a technician to work on it, but to be patient... After about an hour (it was getting close to 11:15 at this point) there still was no progress made, so we called the front desk and told them just to wait to fix the problem tomorrow. The room is not air conditioned, so the fan really is the only thing that cools the room down, but we were both so tired by this point, that we just wanted to try to get some sleep, rather than wait up for a technician. About five minutes later, we got a call from reception saying that they had fixed the problem. We switched on the lights, and they came on, but no fan. In the process of trying to turn the fan on, we shorted out the lights again and by 11:30 had no fan or lights, and decided just to leave it until the morning...


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Location:Kenya