Friday, September 25, 2009

14th Sept – Lake Baringo and Bogoria.




The drive from Eldoret over and into the Rift Valley is remarkable. I think our highest point we were at was 2700 metres above see level, consider this when Gauteng and Table mountain top is about 1250 Metres. We stayed at Roberts Camp on Lake Baringo. I was not very impressed, but the bird life seemed good. There was also a big croc on the lake edge about 20 metres in front of us as well as some hippo’s. Although extremely hot I decided against going for a swim, He He. We met an ex South African and his Ausie wife who have been sailing for some months from Dubai (After living in Dubai for the last 8 years) to Seychelles, then decided they had enough of that and are now travelling Southern Africa before leaving to emigrate to Perth in Aus. They = Robert and Kate and 3 kids came over and joined us for a braai. We overdid it a bit that night and took awhile to get moving the next morning to Lake Bogoria which was only about 70 K’s away. But 70k’s can take 3 hours as we found out.
Well let me start by saying that I have never seen or imagined ever seeing SOOoooo many flamingos in my life. Millions upon millions. The lake is probably about 20k’s long and all the way were these hot water springs with boiling hot water/steam shooting out. I put my finger in the water and found out how hot it was – ouch. This would then run into the lake and cause algae to grow rapidly and all the flamingos would be at the lake edge eating this algae. We stayed at Fig Tree Camp, on the water, which is at the end of the lake and all the way were millions upon millions of flamingos. Incredible. I’m going back there one day, this must be one of the best high lights of our trip. A big Wow factor here. Fig Tree is really bush camping but at least they have a beautiful stream running at the end of the camp right next to us and there is a concreted bath about a 50 meter walk up the hill through these humongous fig trees. Very romantic, He he he as we found out. The air was 36 Degrees at 6 that night, is was so hot that the stream (and not steam) bath was very welcome. That night we sweated the whole night, just far too hot for us.
We woke up in the morning about 7 am only to see the most spectacular sight – it seemed that all the entire population of flamingos came to our side of the lake – right there in front of us. Absolutely marvellous.

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