I awoke to light creeping over the crater and the faint song of the Maasai. No stockings in sight, but a gorgeous view and mango juice more than made up for a typical Christmas morning.
There was more good people watching on the drive over to Lake Nakuru National Park. Stanley says kids typically get new clothes at Christmas. Flouncy or sparkly dresses were popular, as were slender jeans and fashionable tees. Most of the shops were closed and petrol trucks made a long line next to the closed fuel depot.
If you’re curious what these towns and cities look like, I recommend cruising around Google Street View. Here’s a place nearby: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Xb1nYaK8DbfccUKX9?g_st=ic
At the National Park there was some confusion because our tour operator accidentally purchased tickets for the wrong day. Annoyingly, the gate guard didn’t write any clarification, so Stanley needed to explain the mixup two more times before we were out of the park.
Just past the entrance is a view of contrast: zebra and buffalo in the foreground and the tangle of the city in the background. While our eyes were roaming for leopard we saw dozens of monkeys and baboons.
Closer to the lakefront were pelicans, cormorants, flamingos, and fisher eagles. Lake Nakuru used to have thousands of flamingos but shifting tectonic plates caused the water level to rise to an uncomfortable level. Now the water is slowly dropping so a few hundred have returned.
The highlight of the drive was watching two rhino relaxing close to the track. The birds picking insects from the rhino skin also tried going right in their ears.
There was a picnic area near a waterfall where we enjoyed lunch. The rest rooms on the trip have been decent until these ones! It’s good to always have TP and water packed. Vervet and colobus monkeys were interested in our lunch.
Since it is Christmas Day there were many Kenyans also on holiday at the park. Little sedans are not particularly suited for rough dirt roads but I admire the memory-making of the families giving it a go. All the traffic made for a particularly dusty drive.
Stanley humored us with a quick stop at a supermarket. Lots of choices for chips, little for candy, and loads of smaller household goods, including an entire end cap of toothpicks and another of shoe polish. We had some difficulty at checkout. Instead of just accepting M-Pesa, they also wanted Ned’s Kenyan phone number, which we didn’t know. Eventually they agreed that seeing Ned’s Messenger chat with SafariCom in combination with watching the 750KES ($4.87) go into their account was sufficient. At least we got a free piece of Christmas cake on the way out!
Not long after returning to relax, a slight drizzle started, which turned into a nice healthy rain. It feels so good to have rain! I hope it helps with the dust for the drive tomorrow.
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