Little Governors' camp to Giraffe Manor; Kenya Day Eight and Nine

Day Eight: August 17: Little Governors' morning safari and flight to Nairobi. 
A pretty uneventful morning for the most part. There was a lot of overcast. We saw a couple bat eared foxes foraging. That was kind of neat. You don't see them often as they are a nocturnal animal. The only thing that we found of any interest to us was the cheetah mother and 2 month old cub that we saw while at our first camp at Kicheche. Unfortunately the sighting was in tall grass off road, so we could only stay a few minutes and take a couple pictures before we had to leave. We had a nice flight to Nairobi. The sky was clear and the terrain between the Masai Mara and Nairobi is very interesting.

There was a bit of a mix up with our driver at Nairobi. He misunderstood and was waiting at the wrong airline for us, so that was a good lesson for next time. You don't want to be stranded in Nairobi at dark! He finally found us though and we checked in to Giraffe Manor with a few minutes to spare before dinner time.

Day Nine: August 18: Giraffe Manor and David Sheldrick Elephant Sanctuary

Gaye feeding Kelly at our bedroom window

Today the overcast is pretty thick again, so we couldn’t really take many pictures of the giraffes at breakfast. It was just too dark. The new babies that were born here last year were killed by the lions from Nairobi national park and Jock Jr., The dominant male giraffe of the herd died two weeks ago. He got his neck caught in the ‘v’ of a tree and rather than lifting up, he panicked and stangled himself, so sadly the herd here is short a dominant male. Daisey and Arlene died suddenly and no one knows why. At the same time, 40 giraffes in one of the nearby Kenya National Parks  (I can’t remember which park)  also died. No one knows why, but there must have been some weird phenomenom of nature going on in 2011. Regardless, it was a difficult year for Giraffe Manor. Giraffe manor also got four new giraffes in July, but they are scared of people so they don’t come up to the manor or giraffe centre yet. Ed was born in April, 2010 and spent our entire breakfast at our window. Ed is very gentle and very friendly, but he ocassionaly dropped his pellets on my plate. As much as I like him, I wasn’t really interested in him sharing his treats with me.

Baby ellies at the David Sheldrick Elephant
Orphanage coming back at lunch time to be
fed their milk formula.

This afternoon we checked out the ellies at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. It was pretty neat to see Sities, the ellie that we fostered two years ago. Two years ago she was quietly sucking on her keepers hand and today, she was 800kgs of rambunctious elephant. Within the next two years she will be transfered to the Tsavo location where she will be introduced to the wild herds. From there within the next couple years she will be just another elephant living in the wild.

More images of giraffes from Giraffe Manor and ellies from the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust can be found on my wildlife photography website.

Little Governors' Camp; Hot Air Balloon Ride, Kenya Day Seven

Day Seven: Aug 16: Hot Air Balloon safari and afternoon safari

The hot air balloon ride was awesome! The morning was a little bit overcasty so I didn’t get any good sunrise shots, but it was really neat photographing the animals below. Gaye and I were a little bit nervous about how it would feel, but for anyone thinking about it, I would highly recommend it. The edge of the basket comes up to your armpits (well, Gaye's armpits), so you feel very secure. Our pilot flew about 65 feet in the air, probably a comfortable 30 feet over the tallest trees. The flight is quite gentle and not in the least bit scary...And neither one of us are good with heights. When you come in for a landing, there is a bench seat close to the floor that you sit on. You sit down, grab on to these handles and ease down to the ground. Of course we were lucky because it wasn't windy and our landing was perfect, but even if the wind picked up I think we still would have felt quite comfortable. The only problem is that there was a lot of over cast that day. I would love to do it once more on a nicer day, but of course mother nature has a mind of her own and we can't control such things. Tomorrow is our last morning game drive. We haven't seen the marsh pride cubs for an entire day now. I hope we will get to see them once more before we leave. 

Little Governors' Camp; Kenya, Day Six

Day Six: Aug 15: Little Governors’ Camp Day Three:

I was going to mention that we had a pretty non-eventful morning which we did, but we still saw three lion cubs by the Musaria airstrip and another two lion cubs from the Paradise pride, so it was still a fun morning.

We spent the afternoon scouting for a cheetah and her eight month old cub. We finally found her at around 5:30p.m. just when the light was getting nice. We didn’t have very long with them, but they posed a bit andplayed a bit and I think we likely got a really nice couple of shots. Tomorrow we get up early to take a hot air balloon ride over the Mara. The people at the camp think I’m a little strange because I don’t want to have the “champagne breakfast” where we land. I was trying to explain to them that light is precious that time of the morning. Our guide will pick us up from the landing site so we can still get our photo session in. Or at least that is the plan anyway.

This is a picture of today's sunrise. The birds landing on this tree are called marabou storks. They are huge, very ugly scavenger birds. There are so many here that I wanted to take a picture of them. This is the only way I could figure out how to make them look even remotely nice.

More images from this year's safari can be found in the "African Wildlife" section of our wildlife photography website.

Little Governors' Camp; Kenya Day Four and Day Five

Day Four: Aug 13; Kicheche then travel to Little Governors’ Camp & LG afternoon safari

The wildebeast love the camp at night and thousands of them basically surround it. All we can hear all night are these gnus honking all night long. We hear an the occasional lion roar, hyena shoot and the odd zebra spat, but there's definitely no silence at night. I tried to video in the pitch black tent so I could use the sound track to tell people what Gaye sounds like when she sleeps (she doesn't really, but I like to tease her anyway), but my video cameras didn’t want to pick up the sound. I was so disappointed. 

Today we made the 90 minute drive to Little Governors’ camp taking pictures along the way. It was a nice leisurely drive and we got some great pictures of a couple affectionate zebra babies and a 3 month old giraffe that still had his umbilical cord attached. Little Governors' camp does have a great atmosphere about it. They have resident wart hogs and this year two little babies that run about 90 miles an hour around the camp. The camp of course has all kinds of the wildlife that wander through. Possum for instance is a huge bull elephant that was visiting just outside the reception area when we were signing in. I think Possum and Blossum (Blossum is the other bull ellie that visits regularly) both like to visit the camp almost daily as we saw them during the day when we were signing in and then again when we were signing out of the camp on our last visit.

Possum; Little Governors'
camp welcoming committee
visiting camp at tent #6

Day Five: Aug 14: Little Governors’ Camp Day Two:

This morning we decided to first check out the marsh cubs. They were in the same spot as when we left last night. Only they were munching on a wildebeast kill. This morning was incredible! We had the marsh pride 6week old babies running around and playing with mom, then a 100 feet away we had Moran and Scarface (two of four male leaders of the pride) fighting and on the other side of the marsh there was a leopard up in the tree only 100 feet away on the other side of the marsh.

For more images, visit our nature photography website.

Olare Oruk Conservancy; Kenya Days 2 and 3

Day Two; Aug 11: Kicheche

I looked up the definition for ‘dumb ass’ in the dictionary. I never would have guessed it, but Websters definition of 'dumb-ass' is two lilly white Canadians who plan to spend 13 hours per day in the blazing hot sun about 150 miles from the equator and forget to bring sunscreen. The UV index here is comparable to a blow torch I’m sure! We did manage to find a camp that had sunscreen priced at a very reasonable $30 a bottle. They think they are so smart charging three times market value. Little do they know, we would have gladly paid 100! All in all a fun day. 

Our highlight was finding six6 week old lion cubs. The light and background wasn’t very good, but it was a lot of fun watching these little characters playing…So cute.

Day Three: Aug 12: Kicheche

We have seen too much to mention, but our highlight today was driving to the south Mara. On a hope and a prayer and knowing there are a mom and four cheetah cubs, our guide drove us an hour to an expanse of fields and tall grass as far as we could see. After looking for about 30 minutes, he spotted the mom and cubs. I have no idea how he found them because they travel a lot and have a huge territory, but he found them and we were fortunate enough to photograph them for a few hours on and off.

Olare Orok Conservancy; Kenya Safari, Day 1

Olare Orok Conservancy, Kenya Day One:
We didn't have any internet for the first three nights, so now I'm playing catch up. Poor Gaye had to endure 13 hour safari game drives for the first part of the trip, but she's a trooper and did just fine.

Day One; Aug 10: Flight out to Olare Oruk and afternoon safari at Kicheche Camp

The flight to the Mara went well and our first day of game drives showed that this camp is very promising. Today we saw two male lions, a lioness a leopard, a few ellies and about 20 giraffes. 

The giraffes were all together. It was entertaining watching these tall gangly animals gracefully walk by us. Of course we also saw hundreds of ungulates. They are almost every where. Our camp is surrounded by wildebeast and zebra mostly and tonight we will be lullibied by herds of these ungulates. From time to time at night we can also hear lions roaring. It sounds like they are right outside our tent, but realistically, I’m sure they are probably miles away. 

I don’t think I got any “home run” pictures yet, but tomorrow is another day and we will be out on safari from sun up to sun down, so I’m excited about the potential.

My images from this and other african trips can be found on our main wildlife photography website.

Travel Days to Africa

Travel Day(s)
Well our first travel day(s) are done now and we are safe and sound in our first hotel in Nairobi. I had forgotten how friendly everyone is here. The pace is much more layed back than in Europe or North America. Before getting to our cab at the airport, I heard "jambo" and "karibu" at least twice just in the airport. Jambo is a friendly greeting and Karibu means welcome. Those are two words that tourists will hear frequently on a daily basis here in Kenya. The Kenyans are a very warm, hospitable people.

The traveling went pretty smoothly. A short flight to Calgary, a short layover, then an 8.5 hour flight to Amsterdam, a couple hours of layover, then a 7.5 hour flight to Nairobi. Poor Gaye, she isn't fond of different foods than she isn't used to. She normally loves airplane food because it is normally quite plain. Plain chicken and pasta, or chicken and rice etc. Well this afternoon (or evening? On our way to Nairobi anyway) our first meal was a choice of either rice and curry or  salmon and pasta in cheese sauce. Well she didn't like either of those options, so we ordered one meal of each and she tried to pick at each of  them a little bit but really wasn't enjoying herself. I think she figured she would eat a bun and savour the next meal. A movie and a sleep later, the second meal came and Gaye was famished. The next meal was fish in a curry sauce and there weren't any choices this time. Gaye doesn't like fish or curry!. The look on her face was priceless. I think I heard something that rhymes with truck, under her breath, but I can't be sure. :)

Tomorrow morning we will be flying out to the Olare Orok Conservancy for the first three days of our safari. This conservancy is relatively new. In fact I don't know that it was even set up when we were here in 2010. A friend on facebook referred me to this camp. I loved her pictures. She said there were very few tourists (our entire camp will only have 12 people as opposed to the normal 50-150. She said that guides are really hard working, so I'm looking forward to it.

A house cat has befriended Gaye and I. He doesn't really want attention, he's just content to sleep at my feet in the lobby outside our hotel room. The funny thing is he isn't even a hotel mascot. They don't know where he lives, but he looks healthy and they don't seem to mind that he's here, so it's all good.

I had better call it a night. We have to get up in six hours to catch our plane and Gaye just opened the door to give me the old "stink eye", so I had better shut the computer down and call it a night.

Lala Salama (sleep well)