Kenya - Lake Nakuru National Park

We began our visit to Kenya by flying into its capital and largest city, Nairobi.

Nairobi is a large metropolitan city of 3 million.

We happened to arrive there at 4:30 in the afternoon...rush hour, or should I say stop hour. We were not scheduled to spend any time in Nairobi but rather drive 2 hours north to Lake Nakuru. Instead the trip took nearly 6 hours. During that 6 hours we were formally introduced to the poor road conditions in Kenya, more on that later.

Our lodging at Lake Nakuru was in a semi-permanent tent site.
It is currently low season and we were the only ones there.
As you might expect internet service was unavailable and electricity was provided by a generator that only operated for an hour each morning and evening.

Our first of many game drives to come began early in the morning.
We were loaded into what I referred to as a "mobile lion lunch wagon". The top pops up for easy access to the tender tasty snacks inside.

Lake Nakuru National Park is approximately 46,000 acres or 72 square miles in size. Sounds large but it is very small compared to the larger Maasai Mara and Serengeti Parks we will visit later.

The park has many varied landscapes from wide open grasslands to forests.

But what we came here to see were the animals and boy were we in for a treat, animals of every kind all over the place. 

(A general note on the photos we have used in this blog of the animals we saw in Africa.  The photos may not represent the number of each type of animal we saw, but rather are the best photos we have to best depict the specific type of animal seen.  In some cases we may have seen only a few of a specific animal and for others we may have seen thousands.)

Zebras

Giraffes

There are 3 types of giraffe in Kenya; the Reticulated, the Maasai and the Rothschild (seen here).  The spots of a Rothschild giraffe only goes to their knees.

Rhinoceros

These are white rhinos, not black, named so for their wide mouth not their color.  The black rhino has a narrow pointed mouth.  "White" came from a mistranslation of the Dutch word "wijd" which means "wide". 

Would not want to meet the business end of that horn!

Rhinos have very poor eyesight but excellent hearing.

Hyena

Impala, these are females.

Male impala

Thomson's gazelles

African or Cape buffalo

The Cape buffalo is the most dangerous animal in the world, in that it is responsible for more human deaths each year than any other animal.

Waterbuck

Baboons

Warthogs

The park is also home to over 400 species of birds but best known for having over a million pink flamingos.

This park may be small but it was a great introduction to many of the animals we will see on our travels through Africa.


Next stop Maasai Mara National Reserve