What I did on my summer vacation

[Tom Wells]

In Kenya - at the south end of the Great Rift Valley which is 6,000 miles long or ~1/4 of the way around the earth!

August 2022:

Great Rift Valley.jpg (515.16 KiB) Viewed 8225 times

[pops]

We went to Colorado and Utah for a couple weeks. Felt like I drove 6000 miles..ugh

[Tom Wells]

Robert,

Glad to see you're still kicking! I'd like to do that trip also - driving sounds like maybe the best way to do that...

Here's my capsule of the Kenya trip:

Kenya was kind of a test and very rewarding. It also gave me more insight into how poor some of its people really are.

The touring was done in Toyota vans modified to allow the roof to lift up about a foot and a half so we could stand and use our cameras from there. Most places in the parks we weren't allowed to get out of the vans. There were too many critters that could make us regret it if we did.

We visited a small village on the way to the 2nd park where the women had gone to get away from the men. There was one hut we were taken inside of where the parents, the children and the goats slept. The goats slept on the dirt floor, the humans had a bit of plastic or cloth to sleep on. No electricity, no water, no bathroom, no windows. Just a 4-1/2 foot ceiling height, maybe 10 feet by 12 feet and constructed of sticks and cardboard, dark on the inside. Since they are in a seven year drought the cardboard is somewhat viable. They haul their water, put acacia thorn walls around the periphery to deter animals and make crafts to sell to try to exist. They manage to send one kid to school each year; it costs $300US to do that so they can only afford to send one. I have no idea how they would view our lifestyles.

The parks reminded me of Jurassic Park - on a very large scale. I don't recall the dimensions, but each was a large number of square miles - you can look up Nairobi Park and Maasai Mara for example. Most had rangers to try to prevent poaching of the larger animals for various reasons - hides, tusks etc. We also did a ride in large skiffs to see an island (lake Naivishu(SP?)) to find sea eagles - which we did.

The roads were the roughest off-road places I've been. That's where the age-test occurred. We were bounced, jounced and flung for sometimes 6 hours a day. There were plenty of things to hold on to, but the cameras had to stay in the seats or on the floor while we were moving to avoid inadvertently damaging them. Legs and arms were in constant flex this way and that, hands sometimes cramped or ached from holding on fiercely. Bodies bounced off various parts of the interior of the van.

Having said that, the whole trip was way worth the effort!

The critters we saw included the big 5 - elephant, rhino, lion, cheetah and leopard, and more 4-footed antelope type thingies than I can recall; impala, zebra, gazelles of several species, wildebeest, and much more such as giraffe, hippo, jackals, cape buffalo, waterbuck and more species of birds than I can identify or recall such as rollers, vultures (hawks in the U.S.), weaver birds, eagles, spectacular pied crows, secretary birds, lots of flycatchers, hornbills, a rabbit, a tortoise and on and on. We saw many white rhino including one with a nursing calf, and one black rhino.

Kay is posting some of the photos and probably will continue - after all she got more than 5,000 pictures to go through. I got hundreds of clips, some of which show critters, some landscape type stuff and some of our 8-person group which at times caused me to laugh so hard I couldn't see. We were lucky to have a very compatible group!

We visited the location of the movie Lion King so if you've seen that you have an idea of what the landscape looks like. Incidentally we saw some very friendly hyrax there including babies! Large, open grasslands, some dotted with sort of isolated small groups of trees or bushes, the omnipresent acacia trees, hills, mountains, rivers, small creeks (two of which we got stuck in and had to be pulled out) and thickets of mixed vegetation including acacia, palm and lots of other stuff.

I almost forgot: the dust!