Not surprisingly, safaris include a lot of animals. Here are some of the ones we saw, fulfilling Cindy’s quest for the “Big Five.” We don’t pretend to be good photographers, by the way.
Crocodilius Bigus Assus. This guy crawled up on a riverbank at our hotel in Sarova Shaba for a regular nightly feeding. He was about 11 feet long. Baboon troop. You know the expression about letting sleeping cheetahs lie… We were lucky to see giraffes several times. Zebra. This pink line is a few hundred thousand flamingos that line the shores of Lake Nakuru. From the road a few miles away, they look like a large pink beach.
This is a gerunuk, which Cindy thought was the cutest thing in Kenya. They’re really very small and then suddenly they pop up and get at higher berries. They were pretty cute. Common Kenyan gripe: They’re Cape Buffalo, not water buffalo, so quit calling them that… Elephants rub against trees to scratch, and cause more deforestation than anything else in nature short of fire. Oryx. They look a lot like Far Side animals up close. Fred noticed this leopard in a tree over the road and stopped in time for us to see it before it ran off. Leopards are very hard to find, we were told, and this one was once again, right there for us–right over the van’s canopy. At the Siana Springs camp they put out food to attract two nocturnal critters right next to the dining area. One of these is a bushbaby and the other is a Genet cat.
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