Safari Day 3

We left Somburu this morning to go to Treetops. Before we left we had breakfast, and a monkey got up on the empty table behind us and took some bread before he was chased away by some staff!

We had to go through the game park to leave, and on the way we saw 2 lions, very close up. The walked up to our van, and Jeffrey (our driver) said they were getting a little too close. We also saw a cheetah, from quite a distance.

As we left on the same extremely bumpy roads by which we had come, our exhaust broke. We made our way to the village outside the game park and sat in the car for about an hour while it was welded back together. I think we all felt slightly at ease being in a village which was probably not used to tourists. We had some people coming to the windows of the van to try to sell us jewlery, but not as many people as I had expected considering we were a captive audience. We all bought some jewlery for very cheap to get them to leave us alone.

We got to the equator and stopped for the demonstration the locals put on for the tourists (more ways to make money! They find endless ways). A guy did a demo to show how the water drains clockwise in the northern hemisphere, counter-clockwise in the southern (I might have mixed those up, who knows. I wasn't a very good student that day, I think the sun really had melted my brain), and doesn't spin around at all but goes straight down on the equator. This goes for regular drains like in the bath and sinks, toilets, and even tornados.

Treetops is a unique lodge in that there are two watering holes right outside of the lodge, and there are lots of observation desk all over the structure. You sit and watch the watering holes to see the animals that come to drink, instead of going on a game drive to find them. You can only take a small toiletries bag there because the rooms are tiny, just big enough for two single beds (and communal loos).

Treetops is where Queen Elizabeth became queen. She was there when her father died. 'She went up Treetops a princess and came down queen.'

There are four floors, each with several observation areas. When we first got there we went to the top observation deck and saw warthogs, buffalo, waterbucks, impala, and birds. Shortly after sitting to dinner the waiter told us there were elephants outside with babies. We all got up to go see and film them. There were some very big ones and lots of younger ones, including a tiny one which was only a few weeks old. The herd was gathering around the baby in a very tight group to start with. It wasn't until a while later when they had taken in their surroundings that they spread out.

After dinner there were even more elephants than the hour before. We went to the ground floor to view them. That was incredible because they were very, very close and we could get a different view of how massive and beautiful they are.

All night it was buffalo and elephants that were at the watering hole. Very briefly two spotted hyenas came around, but they left very quickly. John, Al, Emily, and I had been dying to see hyena because it's one of the things we haven't seen yet. I had gone to our room to get a blanket and had asked John if he wanted his. He said no, but as soon as I got up there he decided he wanted it so left for about 3 minutes to get it. And wouldn't you know as soon as he left I saw a couple of things moving by the vacant watering hole, got the binoculars and saw they were bloody hyena! Everyone who was on the top observation deck was looking at the other side at the elephants, and I kept trying to get everyone's attention but no one could hear me because you have to be really quiet so I was loudly whispering. By the time John had come the hyenas were out of the light. He got to see them a little bit in the dark, but they got scared away and never came back. We didn't see any more on the whole trip and never had good enough light in that brief viewing to take a picture of them. But at least we saw them. And obviously I was pleased that I was the first to spot them! :-)

I went to bed about 12:30, as nothing new came for a long time. John and Alan stayed up for another hour, and although the elephants and buffalo left, nothing else appeared. They got to see the moon rise over Mt Kenya, though.

Each room had a switch you can turn on to be alerted if any game is seen once you're in bed. If something is spotted and you have the alert switched on, a noise will go off in your room. We put that on but it didn't go off all night.