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eleanorroamingkiwi

Amboseli

After the beach we went back to the camp at Voi. Daddy found a column of safari ants. Then he was moving some wood and found a really big scorpion!

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Then we did a drive to Amboseli National Park. On the way we stopped in Tsavo, to see Paterson’s bridge. All that is left of the original bridge is the stone supports, (the rest was bombed in WW1). Daddy really wanted to see it because it is where there were two man eating lions. The lions were called The Ghost and The Darkness. The lions ate over 100 people working on the railway!! Colonel Paterson designed and built the bridge and also killed the lions. He used himself as bait. He must have been CRAZY!

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Then we drove to Amboseli National Park. The last bit of the drive was 18km of the worst corrugations ever! Daddy thinks that is where we blew our shock absorber.

In Amboseli, the best animal we saw was a cheetah! But I also liked the flamingos.

We also saw:

  • Big tusky Elephants
  • Hyena in a den
  • Pelicans
  • Secretary Bird
  • Spoonbills
  • 2 big Lions
  • Crested Cranes
  • Lots of Zebra and Wildebeest
  • Hippos
  • Warthog
  • 3 Giraffes
  • Lots of dust devils
  • A Jackal
  • Big fat Cape Buffalo
  • Babboons and Vervet Monkeys

Daddy also helped a family who had burst 2 tyres. He plugged the hole and we filled their tyre with air, then went back to the lodge with them, to make sure they got there ok. We camped in the park and that night we saw Mt Kilimanjaro! (When we drove round it, it was covered in clouds)

Then we went back to Jungle Junction in Nairobi.

 

 

 

 

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Barefoot Beach

After Ethiopia we went back to Jungle Junction in Nairobi. Then we wanted to go to the beach. We went on a really bad road to Mombasa, it was bad because there were lots of slow trucks to pass.  We stayed one night near Voi. It had a really nice swimming pool.

Then we got to the coast, near Kikambala. We camped in a big garden with lots of flowers. I decorated Genevieve and made her into an African Princess. We tried to go to the beach but the tide was out.  I stood on some sharp coral.We found a nice warm pool to swim in, but there was a man who didn’t go away. So we went back to the camp and swam in the swimming pool.

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Then we drove to the Gede Ruins. They are Swahili Ruins that were abandoned 300 years ago, and now trees are growing over the stones. There were some tombs and a palace. All the rooms were named after things that were found in them, like: the house of the scissors, the house of the iron lamp, the house of the Venetian bead. All of the things were in a museum. There was also a humback whale skeleton.

Mummy was looking for a Golden Rumped Elephant Shrew, but we only saw some Sykes Monkeys.

Then we drove to Barefoot Beach Camp. We camped right on the sand! Because we were really hungry we went to the bar for lunch. Vivi and I had a plate of chips and tried some of Mummy’s prawns and Daddy’s squid. I preferred the squid. We went for a quick and lovely swim in the Indian Ocean and Daddy threw some sea weed at me!!!!

We liked it so much we stayed for three nights. In the morning Mummy went for a run along the beach, but a dog kept on trying to bite her. We all made a fortress on the sand, but the water demolished it. We had lots of swims. Daddy taught me to bob over the waves. It was fun, except when I got clobbered by a big breaker! The sand was very sparkly, from the mica in it. We were told that some Italian tourists came a long time ago and took a truck load of sand, because they thought it was gold.

One night we had dinner there. For dinner I got to make my own pizza!! I put bacon, pineapple and cheese on it. It was very tasty, even better than the pizza in Venice!

 

 

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Ethiopia

I haven’t written for a while. We went to Ethiopia and we had a problem with the internet. Daddy said that the government had turned the internet off.

Ethiopia is very big and we did a lot of driving. On the first day we saw men dressed in orangey, brown clothes, with painted faces and holding spears. Then we couldn’t get to the campsite because the road had been covered in stones. The taniwha drove over the first few, but there were too many and we had to turn round. We spent the night in a hotel in Dilla. I had a pizza but I didn’t like it because it had a hot chilli on top of it. We watched Pollyanna, because we had just finished the book.

The we went a long way north. We stayed at a Soda Lake. There were lots of pumice stones. Vivi and I liked throwing them into the water because they float!

We went through Addis and stopped at a camp on the edge of a cliff. We did a walk to a portuguese bridge. There was a waterfall and the view was really good. We played with two little girls.

Then we went to Gonder. We went to see some castles. They had big wooden doors with staples to hold the wood together. There weren’t very many signs to tell us about them. Some emperors lived there in the 17th century. They had lion cages!

Then we went to a church. We had to take our shoes off. Daddy went in a different door to us girls. The church was all covered in paintings.

Then we went to Lalibela. There were lots of churches that had been cut into the mountain. They are very old and must have taken a loooooong time to cut out. My favourite was the St. George’s church, because I was born on St. George’s day! This church was shaped in a cross. We had to take our shoes off to go inside. Some had paintings in them. There were lots of paintings of St. George killing a dragon. At one church there was a skeleton of a pilgrim.

We saw an old man weaving at the side of the road. We bought a white scarf with a coloured border from him.

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Then we drove back south.  We saw a special typed of Monkey called a Gelada Monkey.It has a red triangle on its tummy and so it is sometimes called a bleeding heart baboon. They are really furry and they are the only monkey that eats grass and they live up really high in the mountains. We took a high road that went to 3,240m!

One day we drove all day and it got dark and it was wet. We couldn’t find our campsite so we stayed at a very nice lodge. My bed was up a ladder and I loved it. The next morning we smashed the breakfast buffet. There was lots of fruit salad, with strawberries and watermelon and pineapple. There was cereal and pikelets and doughnuts and they made us each a fresh omlette.

I was glad to get back to Kenya. I didn’t like it when people called us farangi (foreigner). The roads in Ethiopia are crazy too. There are lots of mountains, crazy buses, rickshaws, and motorbikes, judder bars, and donkeys/goats/cows/camels on the road. Daddy didn’t like it very much, he is going to write a blog about Ethiopia too.

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Baby Animals in Nairobi

Yesterday we drove to an elephant orphanage. They have 15 baby elephants. They were really cute. The elephants came to an area and some people fed them milk from massive milk bottles. Then the elephants played. Some picked up big branches and others rolled in the mud. One tried to climb on top of another. The elephants were really wrinkly and I could touch one. It felt hard and prickly. It had little black hairs on its back. The elephants have come from all over east Africa. It is sad because their Mummies have died, lots of them were taken by poachers for their ivory. One elephant had a hole in its trunk where it was caught in a snare. When it drank water you could see it come out of the hole. Some of the elephants had fallen down old water wells.

We also drove to a giraffe orphanage. They have 12 Rothschild giraffes, and they are endangered. We learnt that there are three different types of giraffe in Kenya. The Masai, The Rothschild and the Reticulated giraffe. We got to feed the giraffes, they have a really long sticky tongue! I was a bit scared but I eventually did it.

The Rothschild giraffe has spots only down to its knees, then it is white coloured. Also the spots can have some black in them. The Reticulated giraffe looks similar, but no black and the spots go all the way down the legs.

The Masai giraffe is the most common in Kenya. It has a spikey spot pattern. We saw lots outside the Masai Mara.

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For dinner we went to a big restaurant called Carnivore. It was really good. At the entrance was a big charcoal BBQ pit. Lots of meat was cooking on big Masai Swords. We had hot plates and the waiters came round and gave us whatever meat we wanted. There was lots of duck, turkey, steak, chicken, and pork. I also tried ostrich and crocodile! My favourite was the ostrich. When you had had enough to eat you lowered the white flag, which means you surrender. For pudding I had pineapple pie.

I was very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very full.

 

 

 

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Going to Nairobi

After the Serengeti we drove to Lake Victoria. We stayed at a fun campsite that had lots of really big rocks on the lakefront to climb on. There were lots of rock hyrax, and a naughty vervet monkey jumped on the Taniwha!

Then we went to Kenya. The border crossing was ok, but they wanted to scan our clothes boxes when we left Tanzania. That was a bit weird!

In Kenya we found a good supermarket but when we came out we couldn’t close the door of the car!!!! Daddy had to tie it closed with a ratchet strap!!

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We stayed at a camp above the Masai Mara. There were lots of zebra and giraffe there. We saw lots of animals on the plains.

Can you see the funny looking cow?

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Then we drove to Nairobi. Daddy was worried about the door falling off when we were on the dirt road. But then we got to tarmac and it was better. We drove through the great rift valley. It is about 50km wide – that is 10 park runs! It is where the african plate is breaking apart 2mm every year. There were lots and lots of trucks climbing the hill out of the valley.

We are now staying at Jungle Junction in Nairobi. It is a campsite where lots of overlanders go – but at the moment we are the only ones here! There are friendly dogs though.

There is internet, so if you would like to Skype me, then tell your parents to talk to my parents.

 

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