Cannundrums: Nairobi National Park

Following Ngorongoro Crater, we left the Ngorongoro Serena Lodge and drove to Nairobi, which included a border crossing from Tanzania to Kenya, where we stayed at the Intercontinental Nairobi Hotel. It was a 316 mile journey that Google maps says would take about nine hours. We were on the road for over eleven hours, but did have the border crossing and several stops at souvenir shops.

Marabou storks - downtown Nairobi and from out hotel window.

The rest of our group slept in, but Judy and I made arrangements with our driver to do an early morning game drive at nearby Nairobi National Park ("NNP"). NNP is in the Nairobi city limits and was only six miles from our hotel, about a 15 minute drive. We met our driver at 6:15 a.m.

NNP was the first national park established in Kenya and is 45.26 square miles and has electric fencing on three sides. The southern boundary is the Mbagathi River and is open to allow migrating wildlife to travel between NNP and the Kitengela plains. There were times when we could see the buildings of Nairobi in the distance. But I loved it. There was a great diversity of wildlife and our guide was open to more bird watching, which I enjoy, with just the two of us in the vehicle, and not focused solely on mammals. We saw a greater variety of birds there as a result.

The following are photos we took in NNP:

An East African eland, the only eland I saw on the trip. It was worth going to NNP just to see it. It was an animal I was looking for the whole trip.

Coke's hartebeest. The best views of hartebeest of the entire trip.

Two male impalas in rut. Probably our most interesting view of impala.

We watched mating lions, our only view of male and female lions interacting on the trip.

Rock hyrax, including young ones.

We spent quite a bit of time watching an amorous male Masai giraffe trying to coax a much smaller female giraffe to mate (unsuccessfully, at least while we watched).