As the sun set over Chobe, we prepared for the next leg of our journey. We flew to Johannesburg. After spending the night, we flew out in the morning to Nairobi, Kenya.
We flew from Nairobi to Amboseli in a tiny little airplane.
We stayed at the Amboseli Serena Lodge. It had delightful gardens, beautiful rooms, and a relaxing veranda where we could just sit and watch the animals go by on the nearby game trail.
Amboseli Serena Lodge also had lots of "resident" vervet monkeys and some very interesting lizards.
We enjoyed many game drives and saw good sized herd of zebra, elephants, wildebeest, gazelle, cape buffalo, and even ostrich.
The zebras liked to spread gossip. They would whisper to each other and tell secrets. One zebra got upset when he thought everybody was talking about him.
Amboseli comes from the Maasai word which means "salty dust." Random dust devils would blow across the plain throughout the day.
The view of Mount Kilamanjaro (Africa's tallest mountain) made a wonderful backdrop for all that we were seeing, but we never managed to see the middle of the mountain. There was always a cloud layer surrounding the mountain so we could only see the top and bottom sticking out above and below the clouds.
The birds have things figured out so that they get an easy meal. The egrets hang out by the elephants and cape buffalo. When these large animals walk, it stirs up the insects in the grasses. This creates a wonderful buffet for the egrets who have to tread carefully to avoid getting stepped on.
Oxpeckers are smaller birds that hang out on the body of the larger animals. They not only get a delicious meal by eating the insects and paracites off of the animals, but they do a service for the animals at the same time by ridding them of these awful pests.
Some of the animals shared the joys of motherhood with us, including the mamma hippo who had a baby that had just been born the previous day.
There were also a couple of proud papas.
