Into Africa

I only had time to get some selected pictures from the safari uploaded, and only one of the videos, which are the best content. I will have more time later this week, but I am also constrained by the bandwidth available here, so the full library of videos may not be up until I get back to Geneva in a couple of weeks.

Until I can provide a more comprehensive accounting of the safari and our day on Friday, a few of the photo highlights follow.

A downside of all the rain is all the mud (or whatever you call a bunch of city grime mixed with water).

At first I thought my expectations for Africa were distorted by all the prejudiced connotations we associate with a huge, diverse content spanning two hemispheres (e.g. poverty, AIDS, lack of infrastructure).  I started to think Africa wasn't that different from Central America... then we ventured outside the confines of Nairobi's business district and headed into one of the urban slums for some field research.

Us white folks are a big hit with kids here.

Friday night we went to Carnivore, a restaurant where they normally serve wild game, e.g. lion, giraffe.  Thankfully, they aren't serving any game right now.  I'm assuming because the draught has wiped out so many animals in the wild.  The following video is pretty dark, but it's the audio that's key.  It's a Kenyan version of Happy Birthday.

Kenya is unbelievably beautiful.  Here you can see where the valley part of the Rift Valley.

I wanted to try riding a zebra, but our safari guide wasn't very keen on the idea.

This picture of a zebra family under a tree was like something straight out of The Lion King (fun fact: "Simba" is Swahili for "lion").

We chased these rhinos for a while... they are unbelievably fast for animals that weigh two metric tons!  I jokingly asked the guide if we could provoke them into ramming our van, but again he didn't see the humor.  I guess my humor doesn't translate into Swahili.
 

This monkey later jumped into one of the vans and stole a carton of orange juice.  Luckily I captured the whole thing on video!

This baby monkey was adorable... lots of video of him, as well.

After we left the national park, we went to a lake that was home to a bunch of hippos.  They stay in the water all day and only come out at night to eat the 40kg of grass that they consume every day, but even mostly submerged these guys are massive and scary (of all the animals in Africa, they are responsible for the most human deaths every year... apparently they just hate us).  I got an incredibly awesome video of a giant bull yawning and raising his head up out of the water... that will be the first video I put up.

The lake was situated in the private sanctuary where they filmed the movie "Out of Africa".  Apparently they brought a bunch of animals into the sanctuary just for the movie, then left them all there.  So it's a little paradise for them where they have lots of human contact and no predators to worry about. 

I chased this baby giraffe (he was still a good 25 feet tall) around a bit, and while he let me get a lot closer than I ever would've guessed, he was still pretty scared of me.  He was surprisingly curious though and was watching us the whole time we were there (all of the other animals ignored us, so I assumed he was curious and not just making sure we weren't trying to have him for dinner).