Another 3-horned chameleon on the path on the way to breakfast this morning, it's interesting to watch how they walk, carefully and painfully slowly placing each foot.
We said many goodbyes and left just after 10am. There is a new ring road in Nairobi - and the section heading our way has just been opened, so with some instructions from Nick (a wildlife photographer we met) we found our way to it and were very quickly at Kikuyu (which had taken us about 2 hours to do in January) where we joined the A104 towards Nakuru. As we'd taken the new ring road which wasn't on the GPS maps yet, we hadn't programmed the GPS but were navigating "old style"..... Some way further on there should have been a major junction for the Narok road, we didn't see it (we did see a very-minor looking junction with a very old almost illegible sign for Narok), after a while we realised that we must have missed it, so stopped and looked at options. We were now up on the escarpment with a drop of several hundred metres to our left - and we needed to turn left. There were a couple of minor dirt roads marked on the GPS so we decided to have a look at the most promising one - it turned out to be little more than a farm track so we decided to continue on to Naivasha and double back down the Old Naivasha Road. This was known territory so presented a lower risk than going down the escarpment on dirt, but more miles. We had a late lunch at the side of the road before Longonot before heading down the Narok road. This is a good road but with some quite steep gradients, many of them marked with omminous "danger" signs. Narok itself suffered very bad flooding earlier in the year with people having been swept away and a lot of damage, evidence was still visible both on the road and in town where we filled with fuel and kept going. We had seen 3 choices for camping between Narok and the Masai Mara, in the end we only found the last one - the Loita Plains Hotel just after the end of the tar. We drove in and asked to camp in their carpark - they were happy and we negotiated the price. We then asked if dinner would be possible, the chef was found and we ordered chicken with veggies and rice (the other choice was goat). Sue did some birding around the hotel which is quite smart, quite large, very African and in the middle of nowhere. There appeared to be two other sets of guests, both African couples enjoying the swimming pool and the gardens. As the sun set (it felt very Namibian somehow) we watched a pair of very large bats with wingspans over a foot wide , long ears and translucent wings swooping round the carpark. Bird of the day today was a golden-winged sunbird, very pretty with long yellow tail streamers.
The chef must have been happy to have some customers - no-one else seemed to be eating - he prepared fried chunks of chicken with piles of rice mixed with tiny vegetables plus a mix of gently fried cabbage, carrots and green pepper nicely seasoned. We were surprised that it was so tasty and ate loads!
Overnight we heard both hyena and zebra calling.
We said many goodbyes and left just after 10am. There is a new ring road in Nairobi - and the section heading our way has just been opened, so with some instructions from Nick (a wildlife photographer we met) we found our way to it and were very quickly at Kikuyu (which had taken us about 2 hours to do in January) where we joined the A104 towards Nakuru. As we'd taken the new ring road which wasn't on the GPS maps yet, we hadn't programmed the GPS but were navigating "old style"..... Some way further on there should have been a major junction for the Narok road, we didn't see it (we did see a very-minor looking junction with a very old almost illegible sign for Narok), after a while we realised that we must have missed it, so stopped and looked at options. We were now up on the escarpment with a drop of several hundred metres to our left - and we needed to turn left. There were a couple of minor dirt roads marked on the GPS so we decided to have a look at the most promising one - it turned out to be little more than a farm track so we decided to continue on to Naivasha and double back down the Old Naivasha Road. This was known territory so presented a lower risk than going down the escarpment on dirt, but more miles. We had a late lunch at the side of the road before Longonot before heading down the Narok road. This is a good road but with some quite steep gradients, many of them marked with omminous "danger" signs. Narok itself suffered very bad flooding earlier in the year with people having been swept away and a lot of damage, evidence was still visible both on the road and in town where we filled with fuel and kept going. We had seen 3 choices for camping between Narok and the Masai Mara, in the end we only found the last one - the Loita Plains Hotel just after the end of the tar. We drove in and asked to camp in their carpark - they were happy and we negotiated the price. We then asked if dinner would be possible, the chef was found and we ordered chicken with veggies and rice (the other choice was goat). Sue did some birding around the hotel which is quite smart, quite large, very African and in the middle of nowhere. There appeared to be two other sets of guests, both African couples enjoying the swimming pool and the gardens. As the sun set (it felt very Namibian somehow) we watched a pair of very large bats with wingspans over a foot wide , long ears and translucent wings swooping round the carpark. Bird of the day today was a golden-winged sunbird, very pretty with long yellow tail streamers.
The chef must have been happy to have some customers - no-one else seemed to be eating - he prepared fried chunks of chicken with piles of rice mixed with tiny vegetables plus a mix of gently fried cabbage, carrots and green pepper nicely seasoned. We were surprised that it was so tasty and ate loads!
Overnight we heard both hyena and zebra calling.