My final Naboisho Conservancy safari had us stalking injured lions for a while. The male lion had a limp and one of the lionesses had a nasty looking open wound on her inner leg. There must have been some fighting with the elephants overnight, we were told. The elephants had been quite noisy near our camp all night and they woke me up with their trumpeting repeatedly.
Perhaps the elephants were still a bit spooked or stressed out from the night’s encounters because they seemed quite hostile towards us in our safari vehicle. One wrapped his trunk around one of his tusks (a sign of flaunting his tusk at us, one of our guides said). Another projected his ears straight out, a sign of hostility. We also saw plenty of zebras and the usual herbivores, but still no leopards!
Sometime shortly after the morning game drive, I began to feel quite sick all of the sudden. Was it my malaria pill? No, it must have been a bout with gastro, because I got very sick on way back to airport. My car sickness was probably due to a number of things, but being called half way to the airport to let us know my flight had arrived 45 minutes early prompted my driver guide to start racing down the very poor four wheel drive tracks – which was about as much as my stomach could take.
As the sole passenger on my first flight, we flew straight into the Maasai Mara National Reserve and parked the plane. All of us on board (me and the crew) had to disembark and wait for an equal sized connecting flight from there back to Nairobi where we were treated with yet more horrendous Nairobi traffic chaos on our return. Some entrepreneurs had created roadblocks on freeway entrance ramps so they could demand bribes from drivers to get out of the traffic. Fortunately, they didn’t interfere with us.
