Abby and Pink, how are the girls today?
Is today your birthing in the pitstops day April? I hope they do well.
Dh is back from Nigeria, the dc are watching Jungle Book, so I can tell you about the trip now.
All dh told me is that I have to meet him at a friend's house, I surmised we will be flying somewhere as the friend is a pilot with his own Cessna . So we are transported off to the friend's hangar and in we climb into this tiny 4 seater plane where I can see all the dials and thingumies. Nervous,moi? Non, well perhaps a teeny bit. At his 'airport' there are just him and a few friends so we push the plane out of the hangar, climb in and off we go in 10 minutes!
We then fly across Masailand, where there is literally nothing to see but bush land and tiny bomas where various villages are, no roads and sadly not much in the way of rivers either.
Landing takes place in Amboseli national park, which is mostly a vast flood plain with huge swamps in the middle. As we fly over to land we can see the swamps with several herds of elephants right in the middle of the swamp feeding!
We then drive to a camp which is about an hour away, through the park, which is actually very depressing because it suffering from a severe drought for the third year in a row and for the first time in my 12 years in Africa I saw carcass after carcass just lying there, even a baby elephant . Nature can be very cruel.
The camp is great, quite new and is a community camp, so the local Maasai helped to build it and it is staffed by them with a proportion of the proceeds going to community development projects like creating permanent water wells. Our room was really lovely with a great view over the plains. It was damn chilly however!! And again very very dry and dusty. What was truly lovely was to not have to worry about what the dc were going to eat and jut enjoy some sundowners instead.
The next day we visited a very good friend with a ds the same age as B, who runs a very posh camp an hour away, again in the middle of nowhere..... They have a small electric fence around their camp because it is so dry all the animals try to come into the camp to eat and one elephant named Adam keeps trashing their vegetable garden!
That night we had some lovely food and put the world to rights, the camp also made us an anniversary cake! Too sweet! The next morning we went for a lovely walk in the bush, avoiding the ellies, looking at cheetah tracks, with the peak of Kilimanjaro accompanying us. Then the very fantastic friend came and picked us up in a huge dust storm and we had a bumpy ride back to Nairobi.
The End.