Up at 5.00am - after a great night's sleep at last! Breakfast overlooking lake and the sky was glowing with the light of the soon to emerge sun making a spectacular entrance to start the day. Watched by darters, black headed weavers and hippos. As we waited for our driver Ross's Turaco visited the fruiting trees along with vervet monkeys. We headed of to the park HQ to collect our guide for the next two days - a tall young Rwandan named Briscoe. We went from l...

We were up at 0400 and away by 0500 in the Ole Sereni car to the airport for our flight to Kigali which left close to 0800. We had a very easy check in as few people were around. We found the restaurant and had breakfast - I went for the fermented millet porridge - a slight mistake not to be repeated! That said before embarking we found a nice coffee shop and that compensated for my breakfast choice. At Kigali after buying our visas $30 each we collected our l...

At 4.45am our car to the airport arrived and we headed off to Heathrow for our 9.30am flight to Nairobi. On arrival in Nairobi we had a steamy wait in the arrivals hall for our luggage after which we got a taxi straight to Ole Sereni arriving at about 11pm Kenyan time (which is 3 hours ahead of the U.K.) We had a nice hot latte in the bar before we headed to bed. Christmas Day dawned and it was lovely to be greeted by great views over Nairobi National Park. We...

This morning we were up at 3.30 again and this time we went up into the Western hide with Catherine, the journalist. She however had to leave early as she and the others were on the early flight to Lusaka leaving at 7.30am. The other couple were off to Livingstone while she was off to stay and write about Latitude - a new hotel that we are staying in next time we visit - so her article will be interesting. Back to the bats -as we arrived there was lots of noise ...

Today we were up at 3.30am for the early morning bat experience - a quick coffee and biscuit then we were off by 4.15am to the BBC hide again. John stayed on the first level and had a very nice unfettered experience on his own. I made it to the top - we felt the morning experience was different to the evening one and unusually more bats seemed to be coming back than went out!! As the sun was waking up we could get pictures which clearly showed they were straw co...