Let's pop to the Park for the day!

One of the reasons Chris and I moved to Kenya was to be able to see as much of the continent as possible. So every week I'm usually thinking ahead on how best to spend the weekend, and this weekend we chose to visit our local park - Nakuru National Park.

The Park was established in 1961 around Lake Nakuru. Traditionally it's been famed for its flamingos however, owing to increased water levels and the changing alkalinity of the lake the flamingos tend to migrate to different lakes, particularly during the breeding season.

The huge increase in rain levels, particularly this year, has meant the lake has flooded over submerging the main entrance gate, many of the campsites, tracks and buildings. New roads have been built and because of the lack of tourists owing to COVID-19 the entrance fees have been halved. This resulted in us having the Park pretty much to ourselves.

The entrance fees run on a 24 hour basis and vary hugely depending on whether you are; a local, resident, tourist, child etc.

The Park is about an hours drive from home and to try to maximum our time there we also organised an overnight stay in Lake Nakuru Lodge, one of two lodges actually situated within the park itself. This proved to be a great idea since our time driving time around the park could really be split into three sessions; mid morning until lunchtime, mid afternoon until dark and finally dawn the following day until mid morning again.

During our first drive we saw so many animals; monkeys, baboons, buffalo, zebra, waterbuck, gazelle and birds galore... the second drive was somewhat disappointing as predictably the rains came down and aside from spotting a lion early on near Lion Hill, we barely saw anything.

The following morning we were back in the car by six o'clock and were treated with views of giraffe and hippos in addition to the amazing dawn views of the lake with mist passing quickly across.

Lion chilling out on the aptly named Lion Hill

Yet again it was Chris's "best day ever in Kenya so far". It just gets better and better!