I repeated the day-plus flights to return home. More on that later.

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After breakfast we had about a two hour game drive while returning to our hotel. Saw lots of animals, but no new things. We safari tourists are so spoiled. We did get a good topi shot looking down at our vehicles.

We passed many Masai giraffe, but most were hidden by bushes. Fortunately, one leapt forward and sacrificed for their beloved Cruise Boy.

The rest of the day was spent working on my pictures and packing for our next-morning flight to Nairobi. There, we had “day rooms” up to our flight times. A group of us left the hotel at 19:00 (7:00pm for you non-24-hour clock folks) for various evening flights. My plane left after 23:00, and I actually managed to go directly to sleep for a few hours.

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So now it’s a few days later. My laundry is done and the Post Office dropped off the 2+ weeks of mail they held for me. I spent a few hours selecting my “Best Of” for this trip. I picked over 50 pictures, which is about what I also picked from my 2006 Kenya-only safari. If you don’t want to go to my Photo Album page, here is a direct link. Remember: these are full-sized photographs.

So, what did I learn during this trip?

• I loved my new camera setup. The Canon R5 mark ii was great; it’s my first mirrorless DSLR. It offers far more options than I need, but I wanted the 45 megapixel full-frame sensor. Even with a large lens (see below), you still need to crop your image if the animal is too far, and this has the megapixels to support that and stay crisp. I need more practice with the video options.
• With a mirrorless camera, of course I needed to buy new lenses. Well, that’s not totally true, there are adapters. But this is the direction the industry is going. The 100-500 zoom lens was amazing, a clear improvement over my much older 100-300. Of the many dozens of other vehicles we saw there were maybe one or two folks with 800+ prime lenses, but I feel a zoom lens is needed for how I take pictures.
• My “up close” lens was a 24-105. I liked the small overlap. I’m not comfortable changing lenses in the bush – a lesson learned from previous travel. With all the dust we kicked up it would be impossible to keep the sensor clean. In this trip 90% or more used the large lens, but the small was useful when I knew we were not doing a game drive.
• Big lesson was with the battery. Seems the R5 uses an updated battery that has the same form factor as the old version. I had no idea. I brought four batteries and one was old, and the camera complained and blocked the taking of video every time I rotated the old battery into it. Fortunately I had a PDF version of the manual on my laptop and I could figure this out.

I’ve added things to my “Packing List” document, such as swim wear and insect spray. I packed stuff I didn’t need, like spare walking shoes and a US-plug extension cord. However, I think those are worth it – imagine if I blew out my only pair of shoes on the first day.

This was my first trip with Tauck, and I am very impressed. I like cruises for two main reasons:

• I only need to unpack once. The ship is the hotel, and it moves into every port.
• It gives me an introduction to different locations.

However, I’ve been looking for a way to get past the introduction phase of locations I’ve enjoyed while cruising. I will start looking at different Tauck options for this. While this is a sample size of one, this particular safari has been offered over 770 times. It was very organized and our guides were top-notch.

I was going to report on my next plan, but it seems the itinerary is changing due to Red Sea “geopolitical issues.” Stay tuned. Until then, take care Cruiseboysians!