We were picked up by Kevin at 7:30. We now have him for another few days. We had about a three and a half hour drive to Lake Nakuru National Park. Along the way we had good views of the Great Rift Valley.
We also had a rest stop at another gift shop where Mary bought a small painting of some stylized flamingos.
The traffic in places was pretty bad…non-stop lines of cars and trucks.
We arrived at Lake Nakuru National Park. This park is located adjacent to a major city so many views of the lake and photos of animals show the city in the background
An eland just inside the park grounds.
We are staying at the hotel, Sarova Lionhill Lodge. We have another massive room. Tara assures us that she just books standard rooms. But many of these lodges are not full so we seem to be getting occasional upgrades to larger rooms.
We had lunch out on the restaurant balcony were we were visited by some pretty birds. They have a feeding station near the restaurant, which helped draw the birds in.
Spekes Weaver
Speckled Mousebird
Great Blue Eared Starling
Superb Starling
At 4:00 we headed out on a game drive.
Mary is pretty disappointed because the main reason for visiting Lake Nakuru was to see the several million flamingos. Unfortunately, in recent years the lake’s water level has started to rise and it is now too deep for the flamingos, so most of them have left for other lakes. So there are very few flamingos left.
On this game drive we saw more animals...
Cape Buffalo,
Impalas,
and Water Buffalo.
It started to rain pretty hard when we were only half way through the drive. But we did see a white rhino up fairly close. And we learned that white and black rhinos are basically about the same color. The biggest difference is that the black rhinos eat leaves and so have a prehensile, pointy, upper lip while the white rhinos graze on grass and so have a wide, squared off lip, better suited for eating grass.
So why, you may ask, are the "not white" ones called white rhinos?
Well, it seems that the Dutch, who moved into Africa a few centuries ago, called them the Wide Mouthed rhinos. And the Dutch word for wide sounded a bit like white. So when the English "took over" they bastardized it to White. (All this according to the guide.)
So now you know.
We also saw at least some flamingos.
That photo was through driving rain but the rain gave the photo the look
of an impressionist painting. Really
pretty.
We also saw some lionesses in the distance.
And also a couple of young male lions fairly close.
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Video of lion
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We didn’t see any black rhinos or leopards. Oh well, maybe tomorrow.
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