Kenya - Amboseli National Park – February 23rd

We flew a small prop plane from the port of Mombasa to Amboseli National Park nestled in the folds of “Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti,” as Toto put it:

I have wanted to see this mountain and stand in this place since I was 14 and read Hemingway’s anthology, “The Green Hills of Africa” that included “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Flying in, we saw herds of elephant but more significantly Cape buffalo, which Joani and I had never seen before:

Once on the ground in safari vehicles, we saw a hippo pod in one of the lagoons fed by the underground flows that run off Kilimanjaro:

We saw tons of elephants (literally) and many zebra, but as we posted lots of those in South Africa, we will skip right to the hyenas. Well, plus maybe one elephant video:

We saw wildebeests in much larger herds than in South Africa. As usual, the wildebeests were grazing alongside herds of zebra. We were able to get much closer for better shots. We got some great shots of zebra, wldebeests, and baboons; but as we posted zebra and baboons from South Africa, here is a great wildebeest video. Well, I also can’t resist one zebra video too:

We did get a good video of baby monkeys playing:

We got a picture of African black ibis to complement our pictures of Brazilian scarlet ibis; and a video of an African secretary bird:

And I have no idea what kind of birds these are, but they are spectacular:

This bird, however, is quite clearly a Marabou Stork, identifiable by the red spot on its chest:

Here are Joani, our pilot and our friend Drew from BC in front of the little prop job we flew in on. I had the co-pilot seat on the way out and Drew on the way back.

Our group from the ship took five small planes to Amboseli. Here is one of the other planes as seen from our plane. Notice that the aperture speed on the iPhone camera is fast enough to “freeze” the propeller (engineers are easily impressed by things like this):

Here is what the landing in Amboseli looked like from the cockpit:

All in all, a totally amazing day.

We have a couple of days at sea on the way to the Seychelles, so I will go back and post Dar Es Salaam and Zanzibar.