Nakuru camping trip with a lion and ten pre-schoolers

I’m not sure what was scarier – the lion was definitely quieter and better behaved overall.

I had originally planned that my three week visit to Tanzania would not involve a lot of traveling around. That didn’t last long as I soon got wind of a plan to travel up to Kenya for a week – partly for visa reasons, but mostly to go camping with various friends to mark Tesni’s birthday over a long weekend.

Sean (Tesni’s husband) had booked a private campsite in Nakuru National Park for us all for the weekend. I visited this park with AD five years ago on my first trip to Kenya – I was looking forward to seeing how it appeared now that the drought had been broken and the lake was no longer empty. Highlights from last time were all the rhino sightings and a herd of buffalo wandering through our campsite.

The advance party of two families arrived Friday, having driven through a lot of rain. I decided to travel over on Saturday with Bobby & Brandy – mostly because the park and camping fees are exorbitant if one is not an East African resident, but also I don’t think I would have fitted in the Prado with all the camping gear the Maarschalks had. It was great to catch up with B&B on the drive over – I rode with Bobby for my RVO mountain-bike adventure last year. By the Saturday evening everyone had arrived – we totaled twelve adults and ten children under the age of five. No-one told me I was signing up for that last part!

Before we had left home on Saturday morning, word had leaked out that a lioness had made an appearance on the edge of the campsite around breakfast time and then proceeded to take up residence in a large tree about thirty metres from the tents! She had quite a limp on her, so I assume had left her pride after a fight with another animal. Apart from the Saturday night (we saw her leave that evening & return the next morning), she spent most of the weekend that close to our camp. Needless to say, this put us rather on edge – especially with so many young children around.

But it all worked out well, and probably helped in keeping the children roaming too far when there was who-knows-what-else in the long grass surrounding the camping. Obviously hungry lions are quite useful for keeping children in check. Contrary to what I thought before the weekend, the game drives weren’t the highlight of the weekend – we saw many flamingoes, giraffes, buffalo, antelope, baboons, zebra and some big rhinos, but they couldn’t compare to just staying in camp and watching and listening to the wildlife nearby.

As well as our lion resident, we had a lot of zebra, buffalo and baboons pass through at various times. But the unexpected sighting was the huge hippopotamus that wandered through Sunday night. I didn’t even know there were hippos in the park (they don’t like the lake as it is quite alkaline) and there was no water close to our campsite; I was pleased by the hippo sighting as the only one I’d previously seen in the wild was in the Masaai Mara five years ago – & it was just sitting in a pond barely visible.

Generally the days camping were passed eating an awful lot of good camp food (bananas stuffed with chocolate, wrapped in tin foil and baked on the side of the campfire may be better than even toasted marshmallows), keeping the children amused, game drives trying to find elusive leopards & other lions and spending time with good friends.

Once the children had gone to bed around nightfall things were quiet and dark enough to hear more lions roaring not that far away, hyenas barking and jackals making some sort of racket. Realising that there were so many children around, I had intended to put my tent well away from all the others so that I might actually get some sleep. But in light of the lion situation, that didn’t seem so prudent – so I put my tent so it was loosely surrounded by (sometimes) sleeping families. While I didn’t think I would get much sleep, this had the advantage of being less likely to be eaten. As it happened, I slept very well – especially considering the morning reports of very unsettled children making a lot of noise at regular intervals.

In all, a very different safari to what I’ve become used to – but it was still fantastic. Enough writing, pictures: