riontel | Kenya: Part VI (Lake Nakuru)

Fields outside of Masai Mara were dotted with wildebeests, a large antelope, also known as gnu. If you like watching wild life documentaries about Africa you probably have seen them during migration, when about two million of them move from Serengeti in Tanzania into Masai Mara in Kenya, crossing Mara river in the process and providing a great feast to the local crocodiles. Migration starts around July, high season for safaris, so we didn't get to see it, we just got to see some beasts that didn't move back to Serengeti yet for whatever reason.

February-March is a calving season for many animals which is why we got to see so many different young ones, including little wildebeesties.

From the plains of Masai Mara we made our way to Lake Nakuru. The drive was horrendous. First we drove two hours retracing our steps on the dirt road to Narok. All of us expected some paved roads from then on but instead we got another few hours on even worse rocky dirt roads all the way to the park. Some time during the ordeal we abandoned our pride and asked the driver how much longer until some tarmac and he calmly assured us that in another twenty minutes there will be a main road. He neglected to mention that we would stay on that road for about five minutes after which we'd be right back to dirt and bare rocks. Land Cruiser is apparently a very sturdy car. BTW, roads inside the parks were much better, not paved, of course, but in comparison quite smooth.

Mbweha Camp (means jackal in Kiswahili, btw), where we stayed, was not as luxurious as Olonana, but still quite nice.

It's major con is that it's situated outside the Nakuru National Park and if you ever go I would recommend to stay in one of the lodges inside instead. Originally it was planned as just a place for us to spend the night to break the trip between Masai Mara and Sweetwaters but we managed to get a game drive in as well. It would have been much easer if we stayed inside and might also have given us a chance to see lionesses hunt.

Interesting and slightly perplexing feature of our hut in the camp was a completely open bathroom that also had a "window" into the bedroom area, a cutout in the wall right behind the bed. Except for a small separator on one side of the commode it was all one open space, no curtains or anything. We got upgraded to a "honeymoon suite" which gave us a traditional British tub outside. A visit from local wild life while bathing might have been an amusing story to tell but we opted out of a bath (it was just way too cold).

Lake Nakuru is famous for its pink flamingos but also has a lot of other animals, some of which have originally been introduced from other parks and assimilated well.

They have herds of buffalo (who also had little ones in tow)

Lots of pelicans

Big cats are some of the recently introduced additions to the fauna and we ran across three lionesses. We were hoping they were out for a hunt but they just wanted a drink of water.

Nakuru is also one of the few places where you can see white rhinos in the wild. They are a bit more social than black rhinos and live in groups, what we saw looked like a family of two adults and a youngster.

They are white rhinos because of the color of their horn, not the color of the skin.

We got a bit unlucky with the flamingos, it was cloudy and pretty late in the evening and not the peak season so there weren't enough light and flamingos to get the full effect of the fluffy pink lake.