Safari!

On Tuesday after Jake’s Greek Final, me, Jake, Asante, and our friends Christi, David, and Christine all hoped in Christi’s car and headed to Amboselli, which is a game park right on the Kenya/Tanzania border. A 3-4 hour trip turned into 6 hours on the way down there. An petroleum truck had gone off the road at one point, so we had to wait while a big crane pulled it out, stopping the traffic for about an hour or hour and a half. Then, the roads were just bad, so we drove slower than someone who always drives in Kenya would.

We got to the park about an hour before check-in for our campsite, so we had to book it to the actual campsite. We got there with 8 minutes to spare, which meant we ended up putting up our tent in the dark, but 2 Masaii guys helped us, which was very kind of them. We made a fire, ate some pb&j sandwiches, talked awhile, and then went to bed.

This was one of the craziest times of the trip for me, lol. Because I’m 21 weeks pregnant, tent/floor sleeping isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. I woke up A LOT and had a ton of trouble falling asleep. So I got to hear all the nighttime sounds, which FREAKED me out. At one point I heard a warthog and I somehow convinced myself it was going to come rush the tent, lol. Silly what your mind will do in the middle of the night. We all woke up safe and sound (and with no mosquito bites!) around 6:00a and headed on a morning game drive.

We headed up Observation Hill that overlooked much of the park and the swampy areas, looking for wild animals. It was great to see the sun rising, eating oranges and banana bread, seeing wild animals grazing around, with Mount Kilimanjaro in the background. Some of our highlights from the morning included seeing over 100 elephants, tons of other animals like zebras, giraffes, wildebeasts, warthogs, baboons, gazelle, and ostriches, and finding a zebra carcass (which the boys decided would be a good addition to our trunk, which smelt horrible).

After a few hours of going around the park in the car, we went to Amboselli Lodge (which is really nice), went back to the campground to pack up the tent, and then headed back to Nairobi around noon. Again, what was supposed to be a 3-4 hour trip ended up about 6-7 hours! We took a wrong turn somewhere, and ended up on the opposite side of Nairobi, which put us going through the city during rush hour. Yikes!

It was so fun to see all of that and get out of the city for awhile. I realized that once we got out, it looked more like my expectation of Africa- acacia trees, animals in the wild, 4-foot-high ant hills (okay, so I didn’t expect to see those in Africa).

Anyway, it was a fun adventure and the camping part pushed my comfort zone for sure, just being 4 ½ months pregnant and bringing a one-year-old was sure to be a challenge, and it was, but well worth it.