Lake Nakuru

Photo courtesy of Alex Law (copyright)

Bush camp. Note the limited facilities.

White rhino

Heading north to Lake Nakuru it was time for a mental recap on how we were doing on the Big 5 front. I reckoned it was three and a bit - lion, water buffalo, elephant and the tail of a very unfortunate leopard (sorry, I claimed that hippo were one of the Big 5 in an earlier blog, my mistake. I'll blame it on the bloke who led the nature walk). We were still in need of a full on leopard and black rhino.

We would have been exceptionally lucky to see black rhino in the Maasai Mara. In the 1980's there were about 800 rhino, but the latest census revealed only 17. The remainder taken by poachers to meet the demand, mainly in Asia, for powdered rhino horn. It is considered, wrongly, to be an aid to sexual potency. Let's hope the little blue pill catches on in the Far East and saves the remainder.

About 200 poachers have also been killed during the same period. That may sound like good news but it isn't. The poachers don't make huge profits from their kills. It is the middle men who make the big bucks from the safety of their nicely furnished offices. Sadly, there are no known cases of a middle man being killed by a charging rhino or shot by the game rangers.

Lake Nakuru is one of the Rift Valley soda lakes. It is a very shallow, strongly alkaline lake. This makes it a very popular haunt for one particular creature - the flamingo.

We stopped at Nakuru town itself on our way to the national park to change money, barter with some amazingly friendly locals and stock up on booze and snacks. There would be no bar at our next camp site. In fact there wouldn't much of anything at our next camp site. I took the opportunity to buy bottles of Tusker, resigned to paying the ransom for Wainwright's return.

The Lake Nakuru National Park is much smaller than the Maasai Mara. What it lacks in size it makes up for by providing a completely different habitat that allowed us to get up close and personal with many animals we had not encountered previously.

These included a small group of spotted hyena and white rhino. The rhino are not indigenous to this area but were moved here from other parts of Africa. They do thrive here and I lost count of the number we saw. Probably more than there are in total in the Maasai Mara.

White rhinos are not actually white. The word 'white' is a mistranslation of the Dutch word 'wijde', meaning wide. This refers to the wide mouth of the this particular rhino. The mouth is ideal for grazing on grassland. The rhino referred to in the Big 5 is the black rhino. This has pointed mouth, which is adapted for eating leaves from scrub and shrubs.

We saw both black and white rhino at Lake Nakuru, so yahoo! That's another ticked off the list. Only a full on sighting of a leopard to go.

We had to wait until our second day at Lake Nakuru before bagging our leopard. We actually saw her three times. On the first occasion she was quite far away and I couldn't get a decent photo of her. On the second occasion she went down into a creek bed quite close by, but she did not reappear and we had to move on.

Finally, we were getting towards the end of our morning visit when we were told that she had gone to ground in a small culvert under the road we were on.

I must admit I wasn't paying much attention when a sudden shout went up and the leopard appeared out of the culvert, close to Isobel. I was on the other side of the truck and only managed some badly focussed shots of her. There was a glorious moment though when she paused and looked back at us. This resulted in a brilliant photo taken by Alex Law and I am indebted to her for letting me have a copy.

Between game drives we camped in the middle of the reserve. Given that all we had in terms of facilities were two long drop loos and a single tap that eventually ran dry you would be forgiven for thinking that it didn't appeal to some of the group. In fact everyone loved it.

I think it was because the camp had a real sense of adventure about it. Leo made a fire and we all sat around it, eating his great food and drinking wine and beer. Above our heads, in the unpolluted skies, were the myriad stars of the southern hemisphere shining out around the densely packed band of the Milky Way.

It was also time to meet the ransom demand for the return of Wainwright.

In the end it was CCTV that was the undoing of the kidnappers. One of the two couples on the trip, Carol and John, have a great system where Carol shoots video of the sights and animals and John takes all the stills. Carol showed me something she had caught on her camcorder.

The footage showed a very furtive looking John (her husband) sneakily removing Wainwright from outside my tent and placing him in a tree! When confronted by the evidence John did what many a ne'er-do-well before him has done - he portrayed himself was an innocent sap, a patsy and was quick to grass on the villain of the piece.

John's story was that he had initially removed Wainwright to get him out of the rain (because garden gnomes aren't used to it???). Then, with the co-operation of JJ, Wainwright was moved to Isobel's cab as a joke. But then things got darker and the dastardly kidnapping was undertaken. All the doings of criminal mastermind - Ally!

Finding myself outnumbered by these outlaws and beyond the reach of the law, I had no alternative to give in to the demands. The drop was made and Wainwright, none the worse for his adventure, re-appeared outside my tent.

Luckily, I didn't leave him there or he would have suffered a dreadful fate.

The Tuskers around the camp fire had an inevitable effect upon me and in the middle of the night I had cause to leave my tent and wander over towards the loos. As instructed by JJ, I shone my head torch around before emerging from my tent to see if any eyes were reflected back at me. I wear contacts, so it was a bit blurry anyway. I then broke my previous best for time taken to pee.

The camp was surrounded by baboons and during the night I was awoken sporadically by the racket they made. I may have dreamed it, but I fancy I also heard a low rumble, which I took to be a passing warthog.

The truth emerged next morning. The baboons were sounding an alarm because there was a lion in the vicinity. And from safety of Isobel both Leo and Julius has watched the lion stroll casually through our little group of tents. How many near death experiences can one man endure I hear you ask. Be assured, I am made of stern stuff. But if I'm ever in that situation again I'll be peeing out of the tent flap.

There is a sad footnote to this story that underpins, all joking aside, how much danger there can be in places like this. The baboons, although they may look like monkeys are in fact very savage apes. The big males are very fearsome. On our final day we lunched at a vantage point called Baboon Cliff. True to its name a couple of large male baboons turned up and tried to steal food from hapless eaters. One baboon even climbed through the roof of a mini bus from another tour group. They are cunning and nasty.

It was only when we had left Nakuru that JJ told us the following:

Four years previously another group, very similar to ours, camped in the park. The group went off and left the cook to prepare a meal for them. The camp was then beset by baboons, trying to steal things from the tents. The hapless cook went to chase them away. But instead of fleeing the baboons summoned more of their number and turned on the chef and killed him.