day one of camping. hippos, crocodiles, and boys who aren't good at camping

Day 32 (10/6)
We left right at 7AM. And then we drove an hour-ish (Kiringe was our driver, and he was too funny with his iPod…he listens to his “mother tongue music” and when he dances he sort of sticks his belly out and waddles, it is absolutely hilarious)

Took a detour to have a lecture on a hill, one of the small Chyulu Hills.

It took a long long time to get up to the Tsavo gate, and the whole time the road was so bumpy that the land cruiser sounded like someone was shaking a can of pennies. But we finally got there and opened up the hatches, went to the lava flows which is as far as you can see black lava, polka dotted with bright green trees that are growing up through the cracks. Around the lava flows it’s much more of a bush-forest with dense low vegetation and the majority is basically dead/eaten because of the drought. It’s a gorgeous park with a lot of hills (the Chyulu Hills) and some areas are much greener and healthier that are teeming with wildlife, its really cool to see the wildlife grazing up a large hill. It just seems to natural and wild. (We saw these areas later in the trip, mostly around the lava flows there isn’t too much life.)

After the lava flows we went to the Mzima springs (Mzima means life in Swahili) and we ate lunch. The vervets were EVERYWHERE. Some literally tried to run up to us and take the food out of our hands when we weren’t paying attention. But we managed to eat our lunch…we’ve learned enough times that the vervets will stay a good distance away if you throw rocks at them or act like you’re going to hit them with a stick. Haha.

Theres a path around the spring that you can walk around, and its really cool because you see hippos and sometimes crocodiles, and bright blue fish. There’s also an underwater viewing area and an overlook of some of the spring. We saw like 10 hippos, that were decently close and I’m always surprised at their shear wideness and mass. At the time we didn’t think we saw any crocodiles, but after looking at the pictures we realized that there were a couple-rock like things that were actually crocodiles.

The elephants in Tsavo are HUGE. For a comparison, I would say that Alice, Kate and Ginny (the elephants at RWP Zoo) are a little more than half the size of these elephants. And for the first 2 days we only saw very big, mature elephants in groups of 5 or 6.

The sunsets were intensely beautiful, it sets right behind the Chyulu Hills, and we went on an afternoon/sunset game drive. We saw Kudu, which we haven’t seen very many of, Zebra, lots and lots of Dik-dik, Elephants and Giraffe. The animals in Tsavo are a lot more wary of vehicles because Tsavo has far fewer tourists, and Tsavo used to have a poaching problem years ago and elephants remember so most don’t get too close to the road or to vehicles.

At the campfire/ dinner, Kiringe told us all about the close calls with lions they have had at the campsite, and Daniel told us about how he got attacked by a Buffalo when he was a kid. We eventually settled into our tents (that we set up earlier that day), I had a 6 person tent with 4 people. The boys all had 4 people to a 4 person tent…some complained and some didn’t. But the ones who complained made it hilarious about how cramped they were and I loved how all the girls were allowed to spread out in bigger tents. They were eventually given extra tents to spread out more. Haha

The moon is also insanely gorgeous. It started out orange-yellow, huge and close to the ground and slowly works its way around the sky throughout the night.