A Walk in the Park

July 22: Saturday was a lab day and Jim and I stayed on site and got caught up with sample processing. We did get to go out that evening into Kimana and drink a couple of Tuskers and shoot pool on a scale model pool table. The balls were about 2/3 the size of standard pool balls, which did nothing for my not-so-great pool game. Good fun though.

Today (Sunday) was our only scheduled day "off". This is not a complaint - this trip has been a lot of fun, tramping around the backcountry looking for water. However today we scheduled a trip to Amboseli National Park which is less than an hours drive from the Center. We got up early to take advantage of the animal's activity in the morning and headed out.

We hadn't even gotten to the park's gate when we encountered a female cheetah with two kittens. Cheetahs are rarely seen so it was pretty amazing to encounter one, even for the brief look that we got.

Entering the park, we had a brief meeting with one of the Park Scientists and arranged for them to take some water samples for us. We'll hopefully get them later next week to run before we depart on Sunday. Following that meeting, we headed out into the park. What a fantastic experience. We saw loads of elephants, wildebeest, Grant's and Thompson's gazelle, zebra, warthog, secretary birds and water buffalo. The wildlife was amazing and there was something to look at around every corner.

Lunchtime brought us to one of the lodges in the park where we had a 5 star buffet and then hung around on an amazing veranda looking out at the savannah. We stayed there for three hours or so as the animals are very inactive in the noon-time heat. It was very peaceful and I really enjoyed the downtime from running around in the field and running samples until well into our evenings. We left the hotel around 3:30 with the plan to drive around a bit more before heading back to the Center.

The only thing we hadn't seen on our safari was lions. During the morning, we had gone into plenty of the palmetto habitat that they tend to frequent, but other than seeing some prints along the side of the road, there were no Simba to be seen - we had pretty much lost hope. One last pass through some of the territory we had covered in the morning brought us some success though. We found a male lion with a female and a couple of cubs sleeping in the shade of a palmetto patch. The males usually group with more than one female and indeed after a bit of watching we saw two more females away from the group of four. We watched them for the better part of an hour, but they didn't do much more than ocassionally raise their heads or roll over. Still, it was amazing to see them there about 40 feet from the side of the road. I swear the male's head was gigantic and his paws were the size of dinner plates. Amazing to watch. It was a very good day.