Amboseli

Mount Kilimanjaro, located near the northern border of Tanzania just south of Kenya, is the tallest mountain on the continent of Africa. It is also one of the tallest single mountains (meaning it doesn't sit within a range) in the world. Our Kenyan guide, Joe, described the mountain as shared between the two countries: Tanzania owns the mountain, but Kenya owns the view. If there was a place we might see Kilimanjaro, it would be when we were at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. With as much of a fill of rhinos as we could probably reasonably expect to get in just one day at Lake Nakuru, we headed south and east to Amboseli and Kilimanjaro. Although Joe wasn't promising us anything.

The road to Amboseli would be the last really long ride of our two week trip. Once we crossed into Tanzania the rides in cars got shorter and easier. But Amboseli made us feel like it had better be worth it. If we thought the road to Masai Mara was long at six and a half hours or the road to Nakuru was brutal at nine hours, the journey to Amboseli topped both of them. It was another nine hour drive, but that was timed after we left the park. My clock to Nakuru started when we left the lodge in Masai Mara and included several stops for some excellent wildlife watching. The road to Amboseli was nine straight hours of highway with just one short stop. And certainly no wildlife.

Our route that day was the main road that runs all the way to the port of Mombasa where Kenya's coast meets the Indian Ocean. Before the road enters Kenya at the border crossing at Malaba, it serves Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan and trucks (or lorries, if you prefer) from those landlocked countries slowly make their way to and from the coast loaded with shipping containers filled with exports from the interior and imports from the sea. And I do mean slowly. The road is one lane each way and it's hilly in many parts. It is slow going most of the way and there is a lot of passing when possible in the other lane. This leads to endless games of generally good-natured and congenial chicken for most of the nine hour ride. If we saw the mountain and some other good stuff at Amboseli it would probably be worth it. Either way, we were doing it anyway.

Following a string of trucks down the road to Amboseli; unable to pass.

Size-wise, Amboseli fell in the middle of the three Kenyan parks on our agenda at 151 square miles, a little more than double the size of Nakuru and still way smaller than Masai Mara. If we were thrilled with the different types of landscapes we'd seen at the two previous parks, Amboseli provided us with the most diverse environment we'd seen to date. 

The word Amboseli is adapted from a Masai word meaning "open plain" but it didn't seem anything of the sort to us. We drove through parts of the Park that resembled the bush we'd driven through in Botswana in 2015, and on our way out two days after our arrival, we crossed the most barren stretch of desert we'd pass over on this trip; although if it had been a couple of months later, it would have been a lake. And then there are the swamps. Yep, in one of the driest parts of the Earth, there are a series of swamps in southern Kenya.

Amboseli's swamps are products of Mount Kilimanjaro. It (or maybe more accurately the snow melt runoff from its peak) is literally the lifegiver of the marshes that we drove around and between in our day and a half of safari drives inside the Park. Water is often in such short supply in many of the spots we visited in February. It should come as no surprise that these water filled areas in Amboseli are heavily visited by wildlife every day.

In my first post about this trip, I described how we were fortunate to find something different and unique at each of the six parks we visited. At Amboseli, we found elephants. Lots of elephants. Amboseli has a larger elephant population than any other park we visited and it shows. We found them in the bush as lone males. We found them in families making their way from the mountain to the grass they love to eat in the Park. And we found them in the swamps in large groups with elephants all around them and even more in the distance. Amboseli even has the elephants that used to live in the Nairobi National Park; they were relocated when the park was fenced to an area smaller than the elephants needed. It's packed full of elephants.

Elephants were the number one reason we wanted to come back to Africa so it should come as no surprise that we were especially looking forward to Amboseli. Watching these animals interact in complex social structures is something I think I can do all day. They are just way more exciting than checking out a herd of impala or seeing a giraffe or two wondering around. Now, that's not to say Amboseli was the only place we saw elephants because it certainly wasn't. In fact, we saw elephants at every single park we visited. They were one of the only few types of animals that we could say this about. It's also not to say that we were disappointed in the lions and leopards and rhinos and all the other wildlife we saw seemingly everywhere we went. But the quality and quantity of elephant sightings at Amboseli outstripped every other place we went.

So how was it? Well, it was pretty amazing. We spent the good majority of one day in the Park, getting up fairly early for a morning drive and then taking an afternoon sojourn after lunch at our safari lodge just outside the gate. We saw a lot in those two drives and we did it in a counterintuitive way from the way we'd done these trips everywhere else. 

Let me explain.

Elephants need variety in their diet. They get leaves from the trees at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro and they get grass (along with plenty of water to wash it down) in the swamps of the Park. Most game drives we have taken in Africa operate on the assumption of "the earlier the better." In other words, get to the spots where the animals are before the mid-day sun comes out and drives them all into the shade. 

Not required at Amboseli, and particularly with the elephants. Because of the complete lack of grass at the mountain and the complete lack of leaves in the Park, the elephants of Amboseli are essentially commuters. That means they make the long trek from the mountain to the swamps and then do the reverse commute in the afternoon when they've had their fill of grass. Don't get up too early to see them because they won't be there. Also remember this is a Park not a reserve; there's only one trail to get to the good stuff and there's no backing up. Timing was key and later, in this case, was better.

 

Elephants are best seen in families, not alone or in twos, although we certainly saw our fair share of bulls by themselves and in bachelor pairs. They travel together, they feed together and they protect one another in groups. This is particularly true of the babies, who are never far from their mother or one of the other females in the herd. Elephant calves are much like human infants. They need to be taken care of and taught what to do with everything, particularly with their trunks. Come across a group of elephants with a baby and you are likely to see mother and baby right next to one another and there's always likely to be at least one member of the herd keeping an eye out for any sort of aggression.

I think my favorite look at the elephants we got at Amboseli was the procession of nine or ten elephants making their morning commute. We saw them from the main trail walking in an absolute straight line from the main road and then were able to cut them off and see them walking towards us and then away towards the swamp once they crossed behind us on the secondary road we turned on to. The "coming" picture is above; the "going" picture is below. In these single files the matriarch of the herd, the single wisest and most experienced female, leads the herd and the smallest of the bunch, the babies, are always in the middle. The herd we saw was trailed by the dominant bull, who was sufficiently far behind the column to not be visible in the photos on this post. He made sure we knew he was there when we first saw them from the main road and we made sure we kept our distance when we stopped for a better look later on. Don't get too close to elephants, folks. You don't want one of these animals coming at you upset.

That logic applies not just to families with babies. On our way out of the Park after our second trip to the swamps we came across a pair of males crossing the road in front of us. After the first one crossed, he turned around, looked at us and marched back onto the road. We backed up. It's the only time I've been in a safari truck where we've backed up. Our driver, Peter, was justifiably taking no chances and we must have been just a bit too close for comfort. Don't want to be there.

In between the commuters we saw in the early-ish morning and the last males who we thought better of being too close to, we spent a good amount of time watching elephants drink, eat and teach their babies what to do to be an elephant. And of course in addition to seeing the elephants in the marshes, we got a good look at elephants (and all sorts of other animals) in front of the great old mountain, Kilimanjaro, who we had come so far to see.

It really is pretty impressive. There's nothing even approaching its size anywhere on the horizon. It is the singular feature that stands out in an otherwise open plain (guess the Masai got this one right in the big picture). When we got to our lodge after the ride from Nakuru, the mountain was already shrouded in mist and when we got up the next morning (the front doors of all the tents at our camp point towards Kilimanjaro) the top was covered in clouds. But by the time we left for our first game drive, the snow-capped top was clearly visible and it stayed that way for most of the day. We already missed one mountain in the past 12 months in Alaska so I'm glad we saw this one pretty clearly. It provided a great backdrop for wildlife watching.

But elephants and the mountain weren't the only excitement we'd get at Amboseli. I mentioned in my first post of this trip that one of the things we hoped to see was a hunt which would result in a kill. While we had seen a pride of lions gathered around the last remnants of a carcass at Masai Mara, we were still looking to see some predator on prey action by the time we reached the foothills of Kilimanjaro. Then the road we were traveling to follow our last elephants of the day led us to a pride of lions.

While we had seen plenty of cats (including lions) at Masai Mara, they were mostly all sleeping or lying down in the shade, probably because it was the middle of the day and lions and other cats tend to do that while the sun is highest in the sky. I was especially interested in seeing lions do something more than sit or lie because, to me, they look so much bigger and powerful when they move around. With their bellies on the ground, lions look like they are somewhat harmless. On four feet? Not so much. These animals are powerful and to be feared.

The pride that we found that afternoon were six strong and we got them when they were just waking from some sort of nap or long sleep. We first laid eyes on one or two near a stand of pretty good sized palm bushes. Eventually two more emerged and they started on the move, looking like this might be a hunt because it resembled what we had seen in our last day in Botswana in 2015 and that was for sure a hunt. Once the first four lions looked back towards the bush and two more lions walked out towards the first four waiting in place, we were positive these lions were looking for some meat.

The objects of the lions' gaze? A herd of wildebeest on the other side of the road we were inching along tracking the pride. It didn't seem like the prey had any idea they were being tracked.

Lions tend to draw attention from tourists. It's not like elephants don't but there are a lot more elephants than there are lions. Elephants at Amboseli stretch about as far as the eye can see in groups of one through five or seven or ten or more. These lions that were eyeing the wildebeest were the only six we saw in the Park. By the time they had gotten around to looking like they were making a serious move on possible dinner, a few more trucks with tourists had shown up. How many trucks are in the picture above? 12? 15? 18? And there were a few more around our vehicle that don't show up in that shot. And this is the shoulder season. I can't imagine what Kenya and Tanzania are like in the summer. It sounded like from our guides that there are self-imposed and peer-enforced time limits. Like five minutes before moving on. I'm glad we came in February and could spend whatever time we liked with whatever we saw.

The line of cars, while notable for its length, also blocked the wildebeests' view of what was about to hunt them. The lions slipped through the vehicular mass and popped out on the other side almost undetected.

The success rate for a lion or group of lions hunting during the day is less than 20%. That means that of every five hunts, at least four are unsuccessful. I'm convinced the one we missed in 2015 was going to result in a kill. There were so many impala and the lions we were watching had them flanked on both sides. It was pretty obvious that this one in Amboseli was going to be over as soon as it started. Yes, the lions got over the road undetected but it didn't take long for the herd to start purposefully trotting away before breaking into a more vigorous light sprint. The only moment of tension was caused when one of the herd broke and ran in the exact opposite direction from his (or her) friends. I cannot fathom why a herd animal would want to break from the pack. In a group, you just have to run faster than the slowest wildebeest. Alone, you have to run faster than the fastest lion. I'd stay with the herd.

Our lion sighting in Amboseli marked the third park in a row where we'd seen these animals and still no hunting and no kills. Our quest for blood would continue even as our guide, Joe, told us tales of people being very affected emotionally when they finally got a look at one in person. For this day and this abandoned hunt, we were done.

The next morning we passed through Amboseli on our way out of Kenya and into Tanzania. Three parks down, three to go and each one had a different story so far. We got cats at Masai Mara and rhinos (but no flamingos) at Lake Nakuru. Amboseli gave us our best look at elephants. 

There are a few last points I'd like to make about this place before moving on and ending this post.

First, and this is in no way critical of or complaining about the wildlife sightings we saw there, Amboseli made me appreciate our time two and a half years ago in Botswana more than ever. We saw and watched elephants far more effectively and intimately from the Chobe River in a small boat than we ever have in a vehicle with wheels. Amboseli was gorgeous and unforgettable and it got us looks at so many different species of animals in an amazing way. But it didn't get us what we got in Botswana.

Second, I promised in my first post about this trip that I would share some of my favorite photographs even if they didn't fit in with whatever narrative the particular park gave us in any one post. Right after we saw the parade of elephants on our morning game drive, we saw a zebra rolling in the dust of the bush. I missed him (or her, I guess) rolling around but got the dust shake off in action. That picture is below. I love it because the zebra appears to be standing dead still and just shaking the dust off its head and neck, which I suppose really is exactly what is happening.

Finally, and sadly, climate change is affecting Amboseli just like it has already affected Lake Nakuru National Park, where we stayed right before Amboseli. Kilimanjaro is not getting as much snow as it used to due to the temperature of the Earth rising. That's causing less snow melt which feeds the swamps where the animals in and around the area get water. Whether you believe our planet is getting warmer due to man-made causes or natural causes, there's no doubt that it is, in fact, getting warmer. And that's going to affect areas like Amboseli. When it happens and it causes the death of these swamps, it's not like the animals can wander off somewhere else. Man has pretty much taken over everywhere else. Something bad will happen.

The solution, or some ideas for some solutions, are apparently in progress already. The flamingos already mostly left Nakuru. The elephants can't just as easily leave Amboseli.

We, however, did, taking off across the desert that would in a few weeks become flooded by Lake Amboseli. I'll end this post with a couple of giraffe running across that baked dirt. Just a couple of miles away from the swamps of Amboseli, things are very, very different. Imagine how much poorer we'd be if the whole place looked like the picture below.