A Quick Ride Around Kenya

Next I decided to ride northward and see yet another national park... Samburu NP

This area is also very arid much like the Mara region.

I rode North from Nairobi through the highlands via the sizable town of Thika (Flame Trees very apparent along the main street) and things were pretty cool and green for a few hours.

 

 

 Then I dropped down of the high country and the land very quickly became semi-desert which lasted for a few more hours before I got to the edge of the park...

I have the same challenge as usual here in that I cant ride my bike in the park... So I spent the night in a crappy little hotel room in the nearby town and then early next morning I rode out to the park entrance and waited around to see if I could get a ride with other tourists... But this time my luck was not very good and I ddint get a ride!

Id waited for about 3 hours but my real problem is that the park is small and not that popular, and this year is a really bad one for tourists in Kenya... I saw a dozen vehicles with tourists leaving the park (camps inside the park) but only a single vehicle entering the park (unfortunately fully loaded). And so I gave up and rode off to an area a few hours away called the Laikipia Plateau.

 



Dust Devil in the desert

Interesting multi-headed palms in the Samburu NP area

Traditional Samburu hut... The Samburu tribe are very closely related to the Massai with very similar lifestyles and values (they value cattle as wealth) and language.


The Laikipia plateau is an area of privately owned land that is not a National park but that is a very good game viewing region... the local land owners mostly earn their money from game park activities rather than cropping or livestock... But the good thing about the area for me is that I can drive around the roads that run between the various properties and do my own game viewing :))

A Reticulated Giraffe ... quite a different skin pattern than the Massai giraffes from earlier posts!

A couple of British ecologists and a helper studying local flower pollination by the side of the road... (Looking for co evolved anatomical adaptations in the pollens and the insects)


I also saw some Grevies zebras which are quite different to the Plains zebras that Ive mostly been seeing but I didn't get any pictures.

After that little ride I decide to head over to a little town called Iten which the owner of the overlander place that Ive been staying at in Nairobi said Id enjoy.... Not sure why, but what the heck, I may as well go see :)