2017/09 Part 2 Amboseli - Sat am drive to Amboseli |
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Nzuki collected us in a different van. This one had a roof which pops up so we could stand and take pictures when on game drives. For our next two nights we were going to be staying at a lodge in Amboseli national park, about four hours away to the southeast. We were beginning our journey there on the Nairobi-Mombasa road, a four lane highway that handles all the truck traffic between the port of Mombasa and the industries of Kenya, Uganda , Rwanda, and Burundi.
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Nairobi & road (3.05) |  |
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Kenya and Tanzania, like most former British territories, drive on the left. The road was busy with traffic and crowds of pedestrians, many taking the chance to skip diagonally through the traffic to get to the other side. Nzuki said that it’s even more chaotic on a weekday. Some of the pedestrians were piling into minibuses, called matatus. Matatu drivers don’t usually own their vehicles; they rent them by the day so they drive like maniacs trying to cram as many paying trips into the 
day as they can.
An ugly urban sprawl surrounds the highway, a mix of factories, warehouses, and houses, some neat and expensive-looking, some with squatters occupying public land. Outside Nairobi the highway goes to two lanes and becomes very slow, with private cars and matatus trying to get past slow moving trucks, overtaking on both sides. Nzuki was having to take to the shoulder to avoid collisions.
Whenever we came to a town or school or market, the road had large speed bumps which forced the traffic to walking 
pace. People standing along the centre line were selling water and melons and onions to drivers. Nzuki warned us to keep our windows closed. Saturday seemed to be market day, or maybe every day is market day. Market stalls sprawled along the road, some with produce stacked high.
We stopped for a break and toilets. These were at the back of a souvenir shop, so we had to walk through. The vendors were desperate to sell but we were determined not to buy. They were also eager to trade anything for our new Tano hats. We had no intention of dragging souvenirs around with us, especially as we were already exceeding the luggage allowance for internal flights. On hearing we lived in Canada they thrust Canadian dollars at us and it was only later we realized that they were trying to get us to convert what they viewed as useless currency into Kenyan shillings or American dollars, either of which is legal tender there. 
Despite the busy road, there were plenty of domestic animals to be seen, some being herded along the roadside, inches from the traffic. These were mainly goats (tails up) and sheep (tails down) and odd looking cattle with a fatty hump, zebus originally from Asia. There were wild animals too, zebras mainly, but also the occasional group of gazelles or wildebeest. Birds were large, from bustards, the Africa’s largest flying birds, to the even larger ostriches.
We weren’t able to stop for pictures because of the traffic but Nzuki promised us a quieter road soon and so it was as we turned south towards Amboseli on a good but mostly empty road. It was the kind of road where you can stop and backup a hundred yards to take a look at something. And that’s what we did a number of times to look at animals or birds.
Most spectacular of these were the giraffes; when you see them you know you’re in Africa as there’s nothing like them anywhere else in the world. A herd of giraffes gives you an idea of what the world looked like when dinosaurs roamed the grasslands. These were Masai giraffes, with irregular dark brown blotches on a yellow coat, most of them darker than those usually shown in picture books.
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Road to Amboseli (4.57) |  |
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There were cattle intermingled with the giraffes and Nzuki thought it likely that the kids looking after the 
cattle were staying close to the giraffes in the hope that tourists would stop and pay to take pictures of 
them. Sure enough the kids emerged from the bush, a little too late as Nzuki roared off.
We were surprised to see brown ostriches; these are the females. Males and females share egg warming duties, with black males camouflaged for the night shift and the females for the day so they are not seen as often in the daytime.
Nzuki introduced us to the most common types of gazelles, Thomson’s with its dark stripes on its sides, and Grant’s with its white 
patch above the tail. Both are pretty and elegant and look to be lunch-sized prey for all the big predators, but they are very fast, over 50 mph when needed.
And then there’s the gerenuk or giraffe-necked gazelle, a name that says it all. Not only can the gerenuk reach the higher branches of the shrubs it can also stand on its back legs to get up close to giraffe height.
We turned onto the park road, a mixture of sand a
nd gravel, fuzzy here with blowing sand. Nzuki soon found that the road’s washboard gravel was too uncomfortable and drove along the shoulder for a while, scooting back onto the road whenever it crossed a culvert. Nzuki asked if this was OK with us and we laughed, having driven hundreds of miles like this across Australia.