Thursday May 7 (Day 5)
We have our bags out of our room by 6 am, and by 6:45 we board
a bus and drive southeast out of Nairobi, past the Nairobi National Park
to the Athi River train stop and through some light industrial areas. The highway narrows down to just a couple of
lanes, and there are all kinds of traffic: school buses, semis, pickups, cars. People cross the road at random areas, safe
enough because the traffic is often at a standstill. Jim decided to forgo the
possible craziness of getting onto the train at the Nairobi central terminus
and have us board on the first station toward our destination. We have to go through a security check which
includes luggage x-ray and body wanding, but it is all over quickly since we
are at an intermediate stop on the railway.
We hang out a bit in the sparsely appointed first-class waiting room,
and then board the train. We are in a
car all to ourselves. Not only do we have boxed breakfast from the Norfolk
hotel, but we have attendants on the train who would supply us with a hot meal
if desired. There aren’t too many
takers; and even the boxed breakfast is more food than most people want to
eat. The uneaten food is saved to give
away.
The railcar is super luxurious, like first class seating on
an airline. Everyone has an individual
lie-flat seat, and a big picture window.
Sadly, the windows aren’t super clean, and I am on the east side of the
train, so there is a lot of glare. The rail bed is incredibly smooth, as nice
as a European train. The Chinese know
how to build rail systems; time will tell if the Kenya government can continue
to pay off the loan.
Going through the savannah we spot some (masai) ostriches, feral
camels, and Grant’s gazelles. The train stops briefly at Emali and Kibwezi, and
we alight at Mtito Andei,
the stop between Tsavo and the Chyulu hills. Off of the train there are four safari
vehicles, and we (Andy, Gail, Cindy, me) randomly choose #4, whose driver is
named Gabriel. We will continue in
vehicle #4 throughout our safari, even though there will be two other vehicles
and two other drivers as we move through the country. Gabriel has pretty good knowledge of
birds, and I think our drivers get preselected at the other stops, because we continue
to have the ‘bird guy’ the rest of our trip.
In Tsavo and Mt Kenya we are in modified
Toyota Land cruisers, which have a top you can pop up so you can stand up
and look out, while in Maasai Mara we are in open-sided cruisers with tiered
seating. All of these cars have abundant
plugs for connecting up electronics, and wifi in Tsavo and Mt Kenya. (We used
our portable hotspot in the Mara). Our
vehicle has the four of us, a driver, and then one Arrangements Abroad or Field
staff (Jim, Albert, Anderson, or Katie)
Mtito Andei means “gathering of vultures”. It’s a town of about 4000 people, but seems pretty much like a rural, poor, third world town. I don’t notice any outfitters stores as you would expect on the outskirts of a US national park. It’s a pretty quick drive from the town to one of the entrances to Tsavo West. Albert turns in some paperwork, and the rangers lift the gate, and we are in.
It’s
another 45 minutes or so to the Kilaguni
Serena Safari Lodge. The lodge reminds me of similar accommodations in US parks,
although smaller. There is a big central
dining area with open outlooks to a large watering hole that is kept full year-round,
so it is quite popular with animals. The
bedrooms are in separate buildings. Each
bed is surrounded by mosquito netting.
There is no air conditioning, and the rooms are quite hot in the evening
and the early parts of the night.
Although there is a ceiling fan, the breeze does not pass easily through
the floor to ceiling netting, and our sliding door to the balcony has no
screening. On the second night we decided to open the slider to get some cool
air and hope that the netting would protect us from bugs and that we would not
wake to bats, lizards or scorpions in our room in the morning. With the slider open we may have heard some hyenas.
Prior to our arrival at the lodge, we stopped at a nearby
watering hole and saw elephants and some other animals. After lunch we went driving through Tsavo,
and saw a lot more!
After an afternoon break, we take a trip to the edge of the
park near the Chyulu hills. These are
remnants of volcanic activity, and there is an exceptionally large lava tube
known as Leviathan. Walking with a few
armed rangers, we make our way through long grass (several ticks found later
that evening, I was one of the victims) to a different smaller tube that was
supposed to have bats. We went down the
entrance with mild difficulty (Adele couldn’t make it all the way down and had
to be helped back out) to the flat floor of the cave. Alas, there were very few bats, although we
did see the occasional skeleton. It
doesn’t take long for a dead bat to skeletonize. We were able to use a rustic
ladder to climb back out the other side.
When we returned in the evening, we saw a variety of animals
coming to and from the watering hole.
Friday May 8 (day 6)
We drove out to Tsavo East. You can’t overestimate the size of the
parks. Tsavo West is 9,000 km2, East is
almost 15,000 km2. Yellowstone, by
comparison is a bit smaller than West alone.
And then the Tsavo conservation area also includes Chyulu Hills /
Kibwezi forest, and next door in Tanzania is Mount Kilimanjaro National
Park. All told there must be around
30000 km2 of protected land (around 11,000 square miles, about the size of Massachusetts).
Tsavo East is much drier than West. The landscape is flat, and a lot of it
reminds me of Arizona, minus the saguaros.
You can replace the cholla with acacias.
After visiting the bridge, we drove on to Lugard Falls and the Galana River (a continuation of the Tsavo River). This is a good size fast flowing river. There were a couple of bus loads of school children, and Anderson gave them an impromptu talk about the importance of natural history museums (he gave us almost the same talk just minutes earlier at the Tsavo bridge).
We had a box lunch
and then drove the seventy miles back to the lodge, mostly on the Mombasa
Nairobi highway. This is a two-lane road, highly traveled by trucks and not in
very good shape (but much better than some of the “roads” we encounter later).
Saturday May 9 (day 7)
We had a beautiful breakfast excursion to ‘Lion Rock’, a kopje (small rocky hill) that hadgreat outlooks onto Tsavo.
Later that day we drove to Mzima Springs, west of the parks. This is a large spring, fed by water percolating through the volcanic Chyulu Hills. It supplies 20,000 cubic meters of water to the south coast of Kenya daily. It’s a short (disappearing underground quite soon after its above ground appearance) but quickly flowing river. There is an underwater viewing station, but the river level is a bit low (the windows looking out are only half underwater), and the glass is cracked and dirty. Not much can be seen through them. Out in the open we see several species of fish, hippos, a single crocodile, kingfishers and other water birds. In 2009 there was a big drought and the spring dried up, leading to the death of a lot of animals.
On our last night in Tsavo, Jim announced that he had to
leave the trip to help his wife with her father, who was in the hospital for
cardiac surgery (It all came out ok). So,
while we were going by plane to the Mt Kenya area the next day, he was going to
take the train back to Nairobi and the US. Never fear, another representative
from Arrangements Abroad, Kate Otter, would be joining us on Monday at The Mt
Kenya Safari Club.
PS
Last night Cindy and I watched the Ghost and the Darkness. This was a mid-1990s thriller based on building the bridge starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. It was awful! The acting was wooden, the script was terrible (William Goldman should be ashamed) with Douglas playing an American southerner (he kept losing the accent), who had no place in the real story. The scenes with the lions were completely unrealistic (and the lions had manes!).
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