Mombassa and pricey hotels

2 rubbish days on buses or varying degrees of comfort. Time to splash out...still, when you splash out you have higher standards hence the 3 room changes since we've been in this colonial pile in Mombassa on the Kenyan coast.

It's a nice town though. Possibly the only one south of Cairo on this continent with atmosphere and hussle. The streets are busy, the architecture occasionally stunning (including possibly the worlds only art deco hindu temple) and the wine is cheap. It's Friday night which means Friday night tea (we've exported this concept to many fellow travellers) so we're a bit tipsy.

Now we're gonna hit a beach. So this may be the last blog for a while cause quite frankly, we only have 3 weeks left and we want to ignore the world we left behind, one more time.

Lake Baringo

3 more Matatus take us up to Lake Baringo. Off the beaten track but surprisingly busy with expats. Just us and the crocs and hippos that share Roberts Camp.

Every night the hippos graze around our tent. The crocs sunbathe just a few yards from our safari style tent. A very surreal experience and all for the bargain price of a 2 quid community fee and the rent of a tent.

Sausage Town

For some reason Naivasha is the home of world rose growing. It is also alone in being the only town we've ever stopped at where everyone is selling sausages. They're thrust in your face, sold from little cool boxes and specialised 3 wheel sausagemobiles.

The Kenyan Countryside

Why spend 1000's on a safari when you can DIY....

We get a Mutatu (overcrowded minivan) up to Naivasha, descending into the Kenyan Rift Valley spread out below Nairobi. It's great to be in a tent, with a pool, even if the food is terrible and the place full of those damned overland trucks full of gap year Aussies too scared to get on a bus.

The reason for being here though is not simply to get drunk on cheap wine and cider, but to do a cycle safari. Cycling through Giraffes, zebra and warthogs is surreal. Tom's 5 quid bike is held together with plasters and promptly falls apart. When we don't take a guide they send us in the wrong direction, thus proving correct their assertions that we'd get'lost and confused'.

When we get back they ask us to pay 24quid for a 1hr boat ride. Apparently we're paying London prices out here.

Nairobi

Nairobi is weird...art deco, old colonial buildings and some very strange 60's skyscrapers and flying saucer buildings. Tom's had his hair massacred - they left me with a mullet and when Sarah asked them to cut it, they left me with a zig zag line very high up my head.

We're got fed up with being hassled about Safaris, so we're gonna do our own on Matatus up to some of the rift valley lakes tmrw for some camping and a wlking safari through Hells Gate National Park we hope.

Have to get out of this internet cafe...they're playing happy clappy Jesus music on repeat!

Ngorongoro Crater

In the morning, the sun rises over Kilimanjaro and Mt Meru in the distance, as we descend into the mist of the crater below. It’s up to 600m down to the crater floor. Many of the animals live their whole life down here. There are enormous elephants, 3 or 4 giant male lions, hyena and jackal, feeding on the wildebeest, zebra and gazelle that graze the pastures. We find a Marshall Eagle with a freshly killed rabbit. Lake Maginda shimmers pink in the haze. Hippos splash around in the marshy grasslands, sharing their space with bathing ostrich. It’s a fittingly beautiful end to a bizarre week.

The last two days, free of all this stress, were two of the best days ever on our travels…
Back across the plains, then up into the highlands and the volcanos of the Eastern Rift Valley, past the Maasai and their herds of goat and cow, up to the rim of the Ngorongoro crater. As we head past hundreds of schoolchildren on their way home, a leopard leaps out of the undergrowth by the side of the road, stands, staring at us for a second, then slopes off into the forest.

The campsite sits on the rim giving us stunning views, we’re woken at night by howling cats and someone having a scrap with a warthog in a tent below us.