Steve and Cathy's Blog

Another misleading title, as the ship spent the day in Mombasa as Cathy and I and about forty-five others flew in four small aircraft about an hour and fifteen minutes northwest of there to Amboseli National Park to spend the day on a game drive.

Amboseli means “small tornado” in Swahili because indeed, there are many small, harmless, what we would call dust devils that arise out of the dust there. The park is 151 square miles in area, and is in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, which is in neighboring Tanzania. Mount Kilimanjaro, whose summit is 19,340 feet above sea level, is the highest peak in Africa. It has snow on the summit year round, and when the snows melt, the water comes down out of the mountain and flows underground into the park. That is what makes it such an attraction to so many species of animal.

We begin our trip at 8:00am by boarding buses outside the ship. The Kenyan Tourist Board is there with a band, dancers, and people handing out shopping bags with maps, guidebooks and so forth. Kenya has got this tourist thing figured out. They make us very, very welcome right from the minute we leave the ship. After wandering through the container port at which we are docked (the second largest port in Africa behind Durban). We make a quick trip to Moi International Airport, where we boarded four Cessna Caravan single-engine aircraft. It takes an hour and fifteen minutes of easy flying to reach the paved airstrip at the park.   We hop out of the plane and board the eight VW buses to which we are individually assigned, ones that are specially rigged for wildlife viewing as the roofs open up about three feet above the roof line so you can stand and view the wildlife and take photos. Off we go around 10-10:30.

The roads in the park are not paved, but they are in pretty good shape. The part of the park that we are going to explore is primarily grassland and (this time of year) marsh. You can see for miles around, and there are miles and miles of these roads.

Our guide is named Joseph, and he works for Akorn, the travel agent through which Oceania arranged this trip. He is a very informed, creative and delightful man who, it becomes obvious very quickly, loves his job and the park. He knows the habits of every single creature in this game reserve. Sometimes I wish I could have recorded everything he told us, as we got quite an education that day.

Any words we might write will not do justice to this beautiful part of Africa. We see thousands and thousands of mammals and an equal number of birds. In the first forty minutes we see wildebeests (aka gnus), zebras, vultures, baboons, herons and egrets.

Then we began to see elephants. And not just see them at a distance, but drive along very slowly until we were often just a few feet from them. Dozens and dozens of them, young, old, male, female, individuals or in groups, walking along the road or wading in the marsh. They are not at all afraid of all the traffic, mainly because we do drive slowly and stop often. Our guide does request that we don’t talk, as human voices spook them.

The photo opportunities are endless. All of us are in elephant-watching heaven. We spend at least a half an hour in one small area, and the elephants are active the entire time, eating, drinking, walking on the road, crossing the road, walking by the vans. It was unbelievable. We had to pinch ourselves. And so quiet! We could actually hear them tearing off the grass with their trunks and then chewing. And an occasional hooomph sound.

We continue on for the rest of the morning, where we see cape buffalo, warthogs, huge ostriches, large secretary birds, hippos, ducks gazelles and impalas … and thousands more of everything else. Just before lunch we happen upon the only giraffes we will see all day (with these game drives, you never know exactly what you will see until you actually are there).

Around 12:30, we are taken to a gorgeous upscale resort in the park named Ol Tukai Lodge. This hotel has Africa style architecture, a huge swimming pool and many other amenities. A delicious buffet lunch of African food specialties, hamburgers, hot dogs, and a huge assortment of desserts are served in a pavilion near the reception area. We ate our lunch looking out at grazing zebras and wildebeests. It was fabulous.

After an hour or so, we hop into the vans for another couple of hours of wildlife viewing and photography. In addition to more of all of the previous species, we see another dozen types of birds, hyenas, and a jackal. Toward the end of our ride, we are directed by another van (all the vans split up and the guides stay in radio contact to tell each other what they are finding) to a pond where there is a flock of about thirty large pelicans swimming about and fishing. They are paddling like mad, with one as the leader. He will stop and everybody will start sticking their heads in the water to fish. Then they’ll all get their heads above water and paddle to the next spot to repeat the performance. It is so cool! It was like a ballet. Mesmerizing.

Alas, the day must come to an end. We get back to the planes and board around 4pm. It takes a bit longer to return to Mombasa, maybe ninety minutes. Just before we land, we spot our ship in the harbor, so we know we are home.

The trip back to the ship in interesting but uneventful. I say interesting because this container port which we must traverse is a madhouse, with containers stacked six or seven high everywhere. There is a huge amount of expansion construction going on here, being done by if not also paid for by the Chinese. That includes a huge expansion of rail facilities for shipping containers inland to most all of central Africa. Smart move by the Chinese. Their stuff is probably in 75% of the containers we see. If this port gets plugged, they don’t get paid on timeFinally we arrive at the ship and board. We have a quick dinner in the dining room, and Steve transfers 362 photos from his camera to his laptop. While many of them will end up being deleted, there are at least a hundred keepers.

I am trying an experiment with this post.  I am adding forty photos, the same ones that are now on the Steve Knight Facebook post, but they have descriptions, which these do not (unless I can figure out how to do that, which is doubtful. As I said above, no words can take the place of photos of the wonderful animals we saw today. For Cathy and Steve, this was the best day on this trip…so far.