A trip over New Year to see the wildlife in Kenya, especially the elephants. We weren't disappointed, seeing a huge variety of animals including lots of lazy looking lions and whole herds of elephant.
Starting from Nairobi and ending with an unusual (for us) three days relaxation on the coast at Mombasa.
We stayed our first night in the Nairobi Hilton and had a really excellent dinner - homemade tomato soup followed by steak. With only a short time in the city we couldn't really get much impression of it - my journal reads "walked around Nairobi, looks a clean city but many lepers in the market area".
The next day we travelled to the Aberdare Country Club via a tea plantation. We didn't stay long, however, just to leave most of our luggage and move out to the Ark for the night.
The Aberdare Country Club is about two hours drive north of Nairobi and set in the Aberdare National Park. The grounds of the club are beautiful and the horizons seem to stretch forever. There are plenty of different types of primates to be seen including beautiful white-tailed Colobus Monkeys - I think we were quite lucky to see these and they were some of the most beautiful creatures we saw on the whole trip.
The main attraction was a night spent at the Ark where there is a watering hole and salt lick, and if you're lucky animals will come and you can get good close-up views. We stayed up most of the night and were rewarded with sights of water buck, lots of African Buffalo and a lone rhinoceros, plus billions of "bally moths" as one of our fellow travelers put it! This was an escorted group of twelve, split into two mini-buses whose roofs lifted up for the game drives.
(to be continued)
