Black & White, Grey, Brown and Pink

2nd Sep, 2008.

And so our safari started. The crank of the engine of our Landcruiser announced the beginning of our 10 day wild trip, as we departed from Nairobi. Our first stop on this journey was Lake Nakuru in Kenya. Nakuru boasts of the one the biggest bird spectacle on earth, with thousands and millions of pink flamingoes hanging around in the lake. To get to Nakaru, we drove towards the rift valley, stopping on our way at our overnight campsite. We quickly pitched ’em up, had a nice lunch of veggie sandwiches, and proceeded towards Lake Nakuru.

Here’s a totally excited M pretending that she is putting in some effort to set up the tent

The sight at Nakuru was unbelievable – there was this thick line of pink highlighting the entire lake! As we drove closer, the thick mass of pink started looking like smaller pixels of pink, and then we started seeing the individual forms of the birds’ bodies. I’ll let the pictures do justice to the scene:

See that pink line on the right of the shoreline of the lake? That "line" is all pink flamingoes!!

Amazing, isn’t it? Can you imagine all this beauty is there just because there’s a lot of algae in the lake! Turns out that Nakuru is an alkaline lake, which attracts algae, which happens to be to pink flamingoes what Pav Bhaaji is to me – their most favorite food.

While the flamingoes were definitely spectacular, they were by no means the only interesting living beings around. Besides the pink, there was:

Grey...

Golden Brown...

Dirty Brown...

Black & White...

And of course, more pink...
And more...

And more...

And more...

We clicked and clicked and clicked pictures of the animals & the setting, both from the lake (most of the pictures above), as well as from a beautiful vantage point called Baboon Point (named after tons of baboons that hang out in the area). As evening dawned, we jumped back into the Landcruiser, and headed off to our campsite, where Geoffrey was waiting for us with some wonderful hot soup and a much-awaited dinner.

Driving back to base camp, after an extremely rewarding day at Lake Nakuru

A Big Day!

2nd Sep 2008

Today was an extremely special day…today, on 2nd Sep 2008, M and I completed ten years of our relationship! Yipee!!

I made it ;)

Wow, “ten years” sounds so long, but it doesn’t feel that way. Seems like only yesterday when I met the girl with the big spectacles at IIT Bombay…and then the whole story got started…bunked classes, long walks around the campus, summer internship, our first job searches, graduation, reunion in the US, getting married, shifting to DINKs (Double Income No Kids) status, partying hard with the Cap1 gang in DC & Richmond, moving to Chicago, the MBA life….Wow…time indeed flies by when you are having a blast!

Anyway, back to the subject of this blog – our travel. Our trip to the real Africa started with our crossing the equator for the first time (barely so – Nairobi is just about a degree south), to land in Nairobi. Technically we had already been in Africa for the last three days when we were in Egypt, but I don’t think you can call Egypt the real Africa. Reason - Egypt looks, feels, talks, and tastes more like middle-east/Asia than anything else.

So we landed in the real Africa, where we were greeted by a large banner saying “Smile, you are in Kenya”! And there was reason to smile as well – we had applied for visa on our arrival at the airport, and were pleasantly surprised to see that the whole process hardly took a few minutes. This left us with only one empty page on each of our passports, as we marched out of the airport, looking for a place to park ourselves for the next few hours, until our safari office would open up in downtown Nairobi. The series of pleasant surprises continued when we saw that the airport cafeteria offered vegetarian samosas!

Later, as we were being transported to the downtown area, we came to know that Nairobi has a pretty big traffic problem. Rush hour traffic is quite bad, and traffic is on a standstill at every intersection in the morning and the evening. This delayed us a bit, but the people at GameTrackers safari were waiting for us, and we quickly took care of some formalities, paid for 12 litres of bottled water, and rented 2 sleeping bags. We then hopped on to our vehicle, and met up with the other 8 people who were going to be our partners-in-crime for the next 10 days!

Our palace-on-wheels for the next 10 days. This awesome workhorse was more than 10 years old, could drive up and down at least 30 degrees of slope, and had air intake at the roof to allow it to wade through bonnet-high waters!

Geoffrey - our wonderful cook. He made some of the best soups I've ever tasted!