Another huge day of travel today. Again, we should have been given the option of local flights, instead we had to fly from Serengeti to Arusha, then drive 4 hours to Amboseli in Kenya. The last 2.5 hours was again on horrendous roads that were so rocky and corrugated that the driver spent most of the time driving on the embankment to actually avoid driving on the road. It rattled the teeth out of our heads and the road noise was so loud that we couldn't even talk to each other. The car felt like it was going to shake apart, and in actual fact a couple of parts inside the car did fall off during the journey.

When we finally arrived in Amboseli National Park, we were taken to the Tortilis Camp. This place was magnificent. A huge, open bar overlooked a huge waterhole where the animals came to drink, including elephants and giraffes. The place was run by a Scottish couple, Graeme and Candy and they were lovely.

Our "tent" was basically a luxury cabin, which overlooked the National Park, only separated by a wire fence some 5 metres away. There was a huge couch on the verandah which you could lay on and watch the animals walk by. I sat there while Lidia had a massage and watched giraffes, gazelles and about 40 baboons walk right past me.

Amboseli boasts some of the largest elephants in Africa and their tusks grow enormously large. We met a guy in the bar who tracks one elephant as his job, which is 48 years old and has tusks that must stretch out 10 feet in front of him.

We saw many, many elephants wallowing in the swamp, and on the second day the clouds cleared over Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa at 5,895 metres.

We were due to travel the same bone-jarring road back to Nairobi after 2 nights at Tortilis, but I contacted the local travel agent and had them investigate the possibility of flying. They were able to organise a flight, so instead of driving for 10.5 hours that day, we flew for 25 minutes, then drove for 4 hours on a sealed road. Again, we were left feeling perplexed as to why our travel agent at home did not think of this.

That night we stayed at the Ark Lodge, which is a lodge that I am sure was built in the 70's and hasn't changed one bit. Their draw card is that they are in the middle of a national park and the animals come to their watering hole and salt lick. There were plenty of elephants attending and we also saw buffalo, hyenas, warthogs, gazelles, mongooses (mongeese?), genet cats and giant forest hogs. The lodge was setup well with a massive viewing room on each of 3 levels where you were literally metres away from the animals. We met a lovely U.S. couple named Jim and Debbie who were so taken with my photographs that they asked me to send them some of them.

The next day w drove up to Lake Nakuru. This lake is supposed to have thousands of flamingos in it, but the water level was too high and there were none, although we did see some pink pelicans so that made up for it. We also saw a few white rhinos and the very rare Rothschild giraffe. We almost saw a leopard but while we were on our way to where they said it was on the 2 way, we came across a tree fallen on the road. Workers were trying to clear it with a chainsaw but they were going to be hours, so we took the long way around and missed the leopard. While our driver was reversing from the fallen tree, smoke started pouring out of the vents. I thought the car was on fire and we would be stranded, but the driver, Kibett, reckoned it was a fuse and kept driving.

Our final 3 nights in Kenya were spent at the Karen Blixen Camp in Maasai Mara. It took another 5 hour, gruelling drive to get there and we were completely over the driving by the time we got there. The roads, if at all possible, were the worst we had encountered in the whole trip and we were being thrown around the vehicle like rag dolls, hanging on to whatever we could for dear life.

Karen Blixen Camp was fantastic, though, and they gave us a cabin overlooking their waterhole, where as soon as we arrived there were 20 hippos and a stack of giraffes came to visit. Elephants came in not much later.

The game drives in Maasai Mara were great. This park borders the Serengeti so it was very similar to what we experienced there, with great, rolling plains full of wildlife. We saw 4 different prides of lions, including one with 3, one month old cubs. They were very playful, jumping all over each other and their mother. There was also a pride of four huge lionesses with two male lions.

Maasai Mara was our last chance for game drives and although we had seen plenty of white rhinos during our trip, we had not yet seen any black rhinos, which are critically endangered. On the very last day, we were very lucky to see two of them. We were standing up in the safari vehicle, which had a pop-up roof, when one of them almost charged the vehicle. Lidia screamed out "Sit down, Scott!" and pulled me down into my seat. When the rhino was only a few feet away from us, Kibett started the vehicle, which stopped the rhino from charging, but it certainly was a heart-starter! Kibett said that it could have easily tipped the vehicle over.

After that we followed the border of Kenya and Tanzania down to a bridge crossing the Mara river. Unfortunately, there had been a wildebeest crossing upstream where 200 of them had drowned and washed up at the bridge. The stench was so unbearable we could hardly stand it.

The bridge was guarded by soldiers with guns and two of them approached us and took us on a guided tour of the area by foot. Lidia was freaking out and didn't want to go because she thought they were going to take us into the bush and shoot us, but I figured that our travel agent knew where we were so it surely had to be safe. Anyway, it turned out to be an interesting walk and we saw stacks of hippos and crocodiles around the river.

I had organised another local flight from the airstrip to Nairobi so the next day we were spared yet another gruelling drive. The only hitch was that our luggage wouldn't fit on the Cessna, so Kibett had to drive our luggage to Nairobi and drop it to the hotel. He was a couple of hours late, which made us a bit nervous after our experience in India where our driver went AWOL with our luggage, got drunk and didn't turn up until 4:00am, but fortunately Kibett was more reliable and we got our luggage.