Our safari buses

Our two Wild Trek Safaris tour vehicles might look like normal minibuses, but they seem to be able to withstand an incredible amount of punishment every day; pot-holes, rutted mud tracks and off-road game drives must take a huge toll on those tires and suspension! 

Each bus can take seven passengers comfortably, and each had a retractable roof for game drives.

Here are more shots:

 

 

And a video of the ladies singing on the bus!

Baboon babes

Babies are always cute, but these baboon babies are really adorable – check out the youngster hitching a ride on dad!
 

Are lions afraid of mosquitos?

Lions that climb trees?

It actually happens inside Lake Nakuru National Park.

We came across this group of three inside the forest that borders the lake. According to our guides, the lions do this to escape the notorious mosquitoes around here!

My digital camera can't get close enough, so I borrow Dr. Li's camera with the powerful zoom lens:

White rhino slideshow

Nakuru offers the chance to get a close (and rare) look at rhinos – these Jurassic-like beauties have huge one-ton bodies, large heads and two horns.

White rhinos aren’t actually white – they range from yellowish brown to slate grey – and the name is said to have evolved from the Dutch word for wide (wijd).

Too many flamingos to count

From the distance, they seem like a pinkish blur on the edge of Lake Nakuru, speckled with dashes of white. The lake is famous for its Lesser and Greater Flamingos, and some four million gather here in August when it actually becomes hard to see the water in between the birds. 

We arrived just as the birds were beginning to fly to the lake (they breed elsewhere), feeding on the algae that blossoms in the droppings-rich waters.

The mass of pink makes an alluring sight, but get close and things become a little less romantic; the shore is smothered in washed-up feathers and bone, and the birds certainly don’t smell as sweet as they look!

Lake Nakuru National Park

On the third day of your Kenya tour, we went to Lake Nakuru, a saltwater lake that is only four feet deep. 

Nothing lives or grows in the water here, but the national park is most famous for two creatures: flamingos and the rhinos that graze in the marshy land nearby. 

The forest and grassy scrub that surround the lake also harbour all sorts of birds and one very unwelcome creature – huge and voracious mosquitoes that were specially bred to eat the smaller malaria-carrying mozzis! 

(Connie can finally put to good use the mosquito net her friend gave her!)

The grazing animals here seemed less skittish than in the Masai Mara, so we were able to get quite close; plenty of cape buffalo, zebra, impala, and baboons. 

We also came across five small fox cubs, that scampered away when they saw us (we couldn’t see their mum).