Lake Nakuru

Further up the Rift Valley is the saline lake Nakuru. It is supposedly Kenya's second most visited park (the Masai Mara is of course the first), although this may be due the the fact that all the overland trucks come here. We set up camp in an unfenced area within the park, careful not to leave anything out, apart from the tents, since the thieving baboons would soon make off with whatever they could get theirs hands on.














The 18,000 hectare park (by comparison the Serengeti is 1.47 million hectares) is centred around the soda lake, which in turn is home to so many flamingos that from a distance it appears pink. The lake shore is the only place were you can alight from your vehicle, giving you a close up view of the flamingos, storks and pelicans, while standing on a spongy surface formed entirely from decaying feathers.

The park is home to white and black rhino (we only had a distant view of the latter), giraffe, zebra, an assortment of antelope, and the tree climbing lion – we saw a lion, but alas not up a tree. But the park is perhaps best for the view you get from Baboon cliff: there you see the whole lake spread out beneath you, with pink patches along the shore line. As we watched, a hyena waded out into the water, collected a dead flamingo, and proceeded back to shore.














After our final night in a tent (for the next week at least), we had another early game drive - fortunately, as we are almost on the equator, there was no need to huddle inside the sleeping bags. After a couple of hours, we got the chance to see how the other half lives; with coffee at Lion Hill Lodge. Sitting overlooking the pool, which in turn overlooks the lake, I wondered what the upgrade price is – we're coming back here in a week's time, and Kirsten will be back for a third time while I'm wheezing my way up Kilimanjaro.














So back to Nairobi: we're going to fly out to Lamu for five days of doing nothing; Ed is flying off to see the gorillas; Doris is off to the garage to have her innards looked at; and everyone else is flying home.