Lake Nakuru National Park Stop

   After leaving Eldoret at ‘oh dark 30’ in the morning Kate and I arrived at Lake Nakuru national park at just after sunrise.  We paid the $90 entry fee and drove into the park’s main gate.  Even before entering the park, the first animals greeted us, in the form of a small Vervet monkeys. 

   The drive around the park took us slightly over 4 hours which included many photo stops along the way.  I was taken back at the beauty of the park and of the animals.  The following pictures are in the order of what we saw as we encircled the lake.  I took roughly 530 shots, and the processing of these 43 took me many hours, so I hope you enjoy.  I would like to thank BUC Chamberlain for his birding ability to find the names of almost all of the birds.

These are the Vervet monkeys at the entrance parking lot.  The sun was still low and made the faces really pop out.  And yes, the one is scratching its rear, and yes, it did smell its hand.

This is an olive baboon, one of thousands in the park.  Their large brow makes mid day shots of them difficult since the shadow hides their eyes, which are often filled with expressions that I want to capture.   

This is a Pied Kingfisher.  I have been trying to get a good Kingfisher shot for about 4 years, spending time along rivers and ponds trying to capture this small, agile bird.  This one was perched on a solitary branch on the side of the road overlooking a pond.

Another Olive Baboon, my lens was reflecting the morning light onto his face and distracting him.  I got the shot as the dot was directly in his left eye, probably upsetting him.

A Steppe Eagle.  These are absolutely massive birds, and appear to be much larger than a Bald Eagle.  The thick entangled branches make focusing on the bird extremely difficult, many shots of the series show a perfectly in-focus limb and fuzzy bird. 

A Thomson’s Gazelle, but I like the shot because of the bird in flight. 

A Water Buffalo with an Ox Picker on its neck.  The Ox Pickers would go into the animal’s mouth, nose, ears in search of the ticks it eats.  Some of the Buffalo had 6 birds working them over without the brute even caring.

In the lake were a variety of birds, including the White Pelican, Rosiet Spoonbill, and Flamingos.  Unfortunately we never took a road that got me close to the lake edge.  Also, the pelicans were tough to shoot since they were so white, even some underexposing was not enough for them not to flare out. 

 

The real gem of the day, a mother White Rhino and her calf.  We watched these two for about 20 minutes as they grazed and drank.  They even wandered very close to our vehicle and we waited for them to back away before we drove out. 

I was happy to grab this shot of two of the large mammals of Africa in the same frame. 

Captured this buffalo as it plowed through the water, especially liking the fact I caught the splash of the water.  The second shot was just a close-up of its surly face. 

After driving by the lake edge, we ventured up onto some cliffs overlooking the Lake.  I found this Red-cheeked Cordon Bleu in one of the scraggly trees. 

The views were amazing, providing some good landscaping shots.  The zoomed in shot shows a group of buffalo and white rhinos lounging around the ruins of a lodge by the lake.

On the cliff were these small animals that looked much like a Marmot.  From a reliable source, the guess is that this animal is a Rock Hyrax. 

Also there were lizards gorging themselves on the insects emerging as the morning warmed up.

Giraffes are never in a position to take a good picture since they are always tangled into the trees eating the leaves.

A Dik Dik that ran onto the road, I leaned out the window to grab this picture, hoping a lion (or angry baboon) wasn’t going to grab me.

We came across a small freshwater pond/bog that had three warthogs around it.  They are more skittish than any other animal we saw in the park, my one shot was as one of them ran off into the grass.

The mesmerizing zebras staring straight at me.

This is a blue helmeted guinea fowl, another BUC find.  These animals were running by, never stopping for me to compose a good shot.  Their blue heads were just too funny looking to pass up.

Another surly Buffalo that came close to investigate the truck. 

Majestic Zebras; they are everywhere in both the park and the rest of Africa.

 

This is a Waterbuck, an animal about the size of an elk with some really nice looking horns/antlers.

A young Olive Baboon in the arms of its mother.  Its face was so animated and happy.

The last zebras we saw before leaving the park.  This included a foal, the only one we saw the whole day.  Our drivers said that young end up as meals to hyenas and lions.

Eldoret Trip

After the overnight stop in Nairobi, 2Lt Underwood and I left for Eldoret.  Our drivers picked us up in the morning after the majority of the rush hour traffic and we got on the road.  It is about a 6 hour drive out there.  Unlike Djibouti where we drive ourselves around and have a translator with us, in Kenya we have two drivers, Sammy and Alex, who provide the vehicles, driving, translating, and a host of other very helpful services, like price negotiating.  

 

We stopped at this overlook, which was full of vendors pushing their goods.  I grabbed a nice piece of fabric from one of them. 

We ran into some baboons along the road.  This mother and baby were very cute.  It was tough composing the photograph without any trash in the background.

In Nakuru, we stopped at the village market and Kate went around buying things. I decided to use the fisheye just to change things up a bit.

Past Nakuru is the equator, which we just had to stop and have my picture taken.  It was the first time I had been at/below the equator.

On the way to Eldoret, we inspected two job sites that finished last year and that had some warranty work.  Something I noticed both here in Kenya and in Djibouti is that lack of maintenance and cleaning at these buildings that AFRICOM has provided.

 

The hotel in Eldoret was cool, we each had our own cottage, where a king bed was in the middle of the room and a half circle shaped bathroom was behind it.  

While driving around downtown to get to a restaurant we saw this woman.  I am astonished by the women carrying a variety of different things on their heads, the most unusual so far was a woman balancing a pick ax.  This woman was balancing a heavy, large object, while swiveling her head back a forth in an energetic cell phone conversation.  BZ to you ma'am.

First Trip to Kenya

   After multiple failed attempts to get to Kenya, due to a variety of threats and issues, I finally flew to Kenya on 2 January.  The flight was at 0330 in the morning, so me and 2Lt Kate Underwood planned to leave the base at 0220.  My LCOL roommate and I were awakened by knocking at 0210.  I was the unfortunate victim of that Ipod alarm clock bug that happened on 1 January 2011.  I rushed out of my CLU and we got to the airport later than we wanted.  The interesting part of some African airways is that if they have all the passengers, they will take off early, VERY EARLY.  We were rushed onto the airplane and were taxiing for takeoff at 0315.  A quick flight down to Nairobi and we were re-routed out to the coast to land at Mombasa due to the fog in Nairobi.  We fueled up and took off again for Nairobi. 

   Our second attempt was successful and we were quickly through customs, grabbed our bags and our driver met us.  He drove us through the bustling metropolis of Nairobi to the north side of the city where the embassies and nice neighborhoods are.  The house is an absolutely beautiful Victorian style home with a high walled yard.  We have full time guards and a caretaker that lives on site.  There are 5 bedrooms with bathrooms for the transient military.  We settled in and then went out for dinner in downtown at an excellent Italian restaurant called Tratoria. 

Below are pictures of the room I have been assigned, the courtyard, and at the restaurant. 

This is my bedroom at the house.  It’s so much bigger than my CLU I don’t know what to do with myself.  I only use about ¼ of the bed because I am used to the small beds in the CLU.

This is the bathroom, which is so much nicer than the shared bathrooms at Camp Lemonnier.  I forgot what it was like taking a shower without shower shoes on.  

 

 

 

Here are some of the flowers from the courtyard.  The late afternoon sun made the flowers just glow.  I enjoyed having a hour just to practice some fundamental photography.

This is the balcony table at the restaurant; downtown Nairobi isn’t much different than any US city, aside from people driving on the left side of the road.