Paddle with hippos, cycle with zebra

Jo and I took advantage of the Jamhuri public holiday (independence from British colonial rule) long weekend to join our flatmate Eddie's birthday celebrations in Lake Naivasha. Eight recently arrived volunteers took the surprisingly traffic-light and spectacular two and a half hour journey up the great rift valley on Saturday morning. By Saturday lunchtime we were unpacked, settled into our fairly basic shared tent and out on the lake.

The primary focus of the boat trip was hippo spotting, so it was an unexpected bonus to be treated to watching sea eagles swoop to grab fish yards from our boat, and then enjoy hanging out with my new favourite bird, the pelican (replacing an as yet unidentified small yet vividly coloured blue and green one I'd seen hours earlier).

We then had a nervous ten minutes as we searched for hippos. My renowned capacity for worry was given plenty to feed on. Hippos are enormous, powerful, and prone to attack humans who stumble between them and their offspring, often by tipping boats over. We are humans, on a very small boat, and could hear regular, tell-tale snorts but couldn't actually see them in the mirky water. Then hippo after hippo popped its head  up for air.Unfortunately the water was too deep for them to stand up so we were denied the full spectacle of the beast, but we passed through several groups of them, at this point our boat driver/guide chose to move a little closer to these two. The character in this photo beat me in the staring competition.  

When we  returned to the campsite we were welcomed back by these tinkers, one of two breeds of monkey we found occupying our trees. The showers on site didn't have a roof, so it was a little disconcerting to know they were in the trees above us. Thankfully, none of them liked what they saw so we  were spared unwelcome visits.

On Sunday we got on our bikes for what we'd been told was something we cannot leave Kenya without doing, and the reports weren't wrong. We hired mountain bikes and cycled through Hell's Gate national park. We have heard conflicting stories regarding the name, but it plays host to a river which probably fed the earliest homo-sapiens. We therefore all descend from this spectacular park, which opens out on plains between cliffs; probably formed through a combination of glacial and volcoanic activity.
We were soon distracted from the landscape and scenery when we relasied we  were cycling on a path through fields populated by herd of antelope, zebra and buffalo; we think the later is the most dangerous of  the beasts we could come across.

Right ugly an' all. Zebra, on the other hand, seemed happy enough to graze a few meteres away from us. These beasts have earned my respect as no-one can tame them; not for them the hod-carrying life of a horse. I am trying to convince Jo that I can become the world's first zebra whisperer, but she has very little faith. The camouflage - which would appear to contrast with its surroundings - works so well because the zebra's main predator, the lion, is colourblind. When a herd of zebra runs off the lines confuse the predators and upset their vision so they can't easily pick one out for dinner.

When we stopped for lunch before strolling through a Masai cultural site, we found these characters intent on eating our food before we did. This picture is taken moments before this baboon tried to grab a banana from our mate Liz's hand. Just like the fat seagull on Rhyll promenade that stole my sandwich, they've evolved into intimidating  scavengers.

We were then led astray by some very bad advice, taking an allegedly easy route home which was thrice as long as the one we had taken to get there, and involved at least three protracted climbs up hills we didn't need to pass. It did afford us a view of a couple of giraffes, which more than made up for the smell of the geothermal power plant we had to ride through. We also managed to capture this view of Lake Naivasha, a place I feel we'll get to know a little better over the course of the next 12 months.