After a final early morning game cruise on Lake Baringo, we got ourselves back to the mainland for the long drive back to Nairobi. Along the way we took our time and swung through the Lake Bogoria Nature Reserve to see if there were any flamingos still hanging around. The lake attracts over a million flamingos at certain times of the year. We were happy enough to have found several hundred still there. The lake is also famous for its boiling hot springs (which the locals like to boil eggs in). The nature reserve is also one of the only places you will find kudus in Kenya. We saw a group of kudus in the southern part of the reserve as well as some dik-diks, which are dwarf antelopes that always live in pairs.
All of the Rift Valley lakes had undergone severe flooding in recent years. Lake Baringo saw its water levels rise a whopping 12 meters. There were different theories as to why, but extra water in the atmosphere and associated storms around the equator due to polar icecaps melting was a common culprit.
The main road through the Lake Bogoria Nature Reserve had been submerged due to these rising lake levels, so we were forced to take a newly carved out road that was very rough. We were advised to come back out the way we came in, but decided to drive straight through – which was worth doing because of the remote beauty. It took us a while to get back on the main road, but we eventually got back on paved roads – only to find the usual horrendous traffic all the way back to Nairobi.
