Monday morning 6:00 am: rise and shine!! Time for our morning game drive in Tsavo West! It was already very sunny and warm, just what the doctor ordered. Before we drove off we had a quick coffee and then we were ready.
The first animals we spotted were some DikDik’s and impala. We saw quiet a few of them during this drive (and previous drives). The landscape is absolutely fantastic here as it’s been in all the national parks and reserves we’ve visited so far.
We didn’t come across much wildlife but did see that the elephants had been active during the night as their dung was spread all over the roads, but no sign of them, unfortunatly.
All of a sudden Benson stands on his break, takes out his binoculars, so I point my lens in the same direction and what did I see up high in a tree??? No guesses?? Yes, another leopard. Wow, we sure are very lucky. 3 leopard spottings in one trip!! Who says they are shy and keep away from the roads?! Ha!
This one looked much healthier than the one we had seen the day before. It was quiet comfy up there, looking around, face in the sun..Later on we heard that it had a little dikdik up there.
Besides some giraffes and some colourful birds we didn’t see all that much wildlife.
A pitty but of course we had been spoiled on our first 2 days at the Mara. The other parks seemed less inhabitat because of it. I am sure if we had done Tsavo, Amboseli before we had done the Mara we would have had a different view on the trip. BUT hey, I am not complaining!! So pleased with all the beauties we have seen so far and for us 2 this isn’t the end yet. We still have Kora and Meru to visit.
After our last drive in Tsavo we had our breakfast, said goodbye to this gorgeous park and headed back to Nairobi for a 4h drive…Which turned into nearly 6 of course.
While we were driving through the gate of Tsavo, the same scene happened as on all our entries and departures from the parks..Masai people coming around to our bus to sell their souvenirs..and I am telling you they are very persistant and pushy at times. That’s one of the things I am not liking so much over here. As soon as you enter a store or shop, they come over and follow you and when you look at something for longer than 5 sec they give you a price and it’s up to you to bargain..and they are very pushy when you say no..I so do not like that! Having that said, we did buy a lovely elephant and lion statue ☺
After a long and warm drive up we finally arrived at the Meridean hotel…only to leave there again after 15 minutes! Now, I am not really the kind of person who needs luxury but this hotel just wasn’t up to much. First of all it was soooooo loud and busy outside. The hotel looked very old and run down…when we entered our rooms there was no electricity (could have been a power cut of course), no warm water, electricity outlets were sticking out of the walls, the smell was well, not so very nice. So when Lie & Ellen came around they had the exact same thought as I did..so we went downstairs, called our tourcompany Servalcat safaris and said we were not going to spend the night there (and the next night) so we asked to bring us back to our first hotel, the Stanley! Tomorrow we will discuss prices..
Because the hotel was rather busy we had to wait a while for our rooms to be ready..a while was over 2h.. but now we are all settled in our comfy rooms and just had a very nice long hot shower! I feel reborn!
Tomorrow we are going to relax and in the afternoon meet up with the lovely people from the Born Free Foundation again. On our first day here they invited us over so that’s exactly what we’ll do!
Sleep tight all!
