The hotel is older than the others were have stay at and the door/window screens were strangely reinforced. Seems the local monkeys will bust in and steal your stuff. Another thing to look out for.
Our guides say that Amboseli has the highest number of elephants per square km in the world, and I believe him. Once the sun was up you can find numerous large family groups. There was one particularly big male hanging around the normally female-only group, perhaps waiting for one of the females to be fertile.
On the other hand, here is one being a bird taxi.
The night before the hotel naturalist explained how tusks were required for elephant grazing. That’s one of the reasons why the anti-poaching technique of park rangers preemptively removed their tusks did not work. Yet we saw a few one-tusked elephants.
The one-tusk male got to within 10m of our vehicle.
We also saw several super-cute infants.
Tidbit – African elephants have two “fingers” at the end of their trunk, where Asian elephants only have one.
What followed was a rather sad scene. A different car called out a young male lion sighting.
The lion spent a fair amount of time cleaning his rear leg. A few minutes of that and our local guide wondered aloud if the lion was injured.
Sure enough, when the lion got up he barely hobbled 10m before needing to stop. You may be able to see scars around his left jaw and body. We never saw his right side, so I don’t know if that’s everything. Some of the guides were confidant he’d get better in a few days, but if not he is going to have a hard time.
The final cool thing of day came when we were planning to cross the park to respond of another vehicle’s call when a cheetah jumped onto a nearby dead tree, trying to spot some lunch.
Our guide almost frightened us with his “Cheetah!” shout.
The cheetah then jumped down and started walking parallel to the road. As other cars starting arriving we realized there were two cheetahs. Our guide said they we likely brothers.
We tried matching their movement, but the road slowly became too full of other vehicles to make that work.
Enough happened this morning, and we have a couple of hour break, that I decided to post this before the evening game drive. Maybe we’ll find more!
We fly to Mount Kenya tomorrow, returning to a higher elevation. Staying at Amboseli is the first time I needed to use insect repellent (“only” 3675 feet / 1120 meters elevation) , but we are returning to over 7000 feet / 2130 meters.
Cruise Boy 