Thursday 7th December

We drove to Nakuru in Kenya today stopping in the town centre for lunch. Last time we stopped here we got so much hassle from the traders in the town it was intimidating. But this time Kate and I knew what to expect and weren't going to be daunted so we didn't dawdle.

We headed straight to the bakery for some food then to the market to buy my first carved giraffe. We knew what we wanted, we didn't window shop at each stall as they all have similar stuff so we just stopped at the first one and haggled with the guy for a soapstone elephant for Kate and a giraffe for me.

I'm getting the hang of this slowly! We came away very pleased with our purchases and as we'd gone about the whole thing with confidence we didn't get any more hassle. Plus we actually enjoyed the experience - strange how you can view someplace very differently on two different days.

Arriving at the campsite they offered to do a tour around the place as it is also a working farm. They have 160 cows and even have milking machinery! They employ 18 men and, yes, even 1 woman (apparently that's quite forward thinking for here) to tend to the cows.

They also employ all the women in the village and some from surrounding villages who knit everything from toys, hats, scarves, rugs and cushion covers. They then export them to a shopping outlet in Conneticut and also some markets in America. I bought James a little zebra hand puppet - hope he likes it! Jobs are so scarce around here that some of the men have decided to take up knitting too rather than be unemployed - apparently this is usually viewed as womens work so again they are quite radical for Africa.

There's also a horse farm here - there were fields of mares with their foals - Kate was in heaven.

The final treat was that we saw a chameleon and I even held him - wait till I put the pictures up. He was beautiful.

Friday 8th December

We went on our first safari today through Nakuru National Park - famous for it's flamingoes and the smell - poo-ey! Having never been on safari I had no idea what to expect and I certainly wasn't disappointed.

The list of animal and birds we saw was amazing. Impala, bushbuck, thompsons gazelle, dik dik, waterbuck, baboons, monkeys, leopards, zebra, water buffalo, tawny eagle, maribou stork, egyptian geese, agama lizard, dassy, ostrich... the list goes on. And here's some interesting facts - if you're interested.....

• Lions don't eat waterbuck as their meet isn't sweet!
• The hammercrop bird builds the biggest nest of any bird in the world.
• The lesser flamingo, which is the more pink of the two types, feeds in shallow water on pink food (like shrimp) that contributes to it's strong colour.
• The white flamingo puts it's entire head into the water to eat blue-green algae. (Is anyone else thinking - why isn't it a blue-green colour - or is it just me?)
• Nakuru is a salty stagnant lake and is only 2 metres deep.
• Pelicans have started flocking here during dry season - this is a fairly new occurrence. The reason they come here is to eat the fish that were introduced to the lake - these fish eat mosquitoes. Since they've been introduced the rate of malaria among locals has significantly dropped.

We were lucky enough to see 3 white rhino's up close! And I mean really close. I didn't realise they were quite so large. The white ones are less common but they are grazers which is why you see them in open areas. The black rhino's are more common but you don't see them so much as they are browsers so they stay in the bush. (Hmm - I feel like I'm giving a nature lesson today.)

Then we saw 2 Rothschild giraffes up close - I was so excited. There are 3 types of giraffe - and the Rothschild is endangered.

Last bit of trivia for today - there are large, slow growing cactus trees in the park called euphorbia caderabla. Just amazing. These too are endangered. The plant is poisonous to humans and the smoke, if burnt, is toxic. The black rhino's however, eat the bark and afterwards ants will crawl into the bark and hollow it out to live in it.

The final treat of the day was seeing a family of warthogs run across the road infront of us - what a funny sight. I didn't realise that when they run they have their tales pointing straight up in the air, and they run in order of size - Dad, Mum, followed by the kids, all in a little line. How funny.

What I also didn't realise is that Simba and Pumba are the african words for Lion and Warthog - bit of a "Lion King" reference for anyone wondering why that's an interesting fact.

Well here endeth the natural history lesson for today! x