They really have all those weird looking animals in Africa!

So this weekend's adventure was heading out to Lake Naivasha. We stayed in a nice Country Club place. This is up north of Nairobi, and kind of in higher land than what we've seen so far. There were actually a lot of places that reminded me of Utah in the high Uintas. Really heavily wooded areas on steep hills. It was pretty cool. Anyway, we went walking out on a big peninsula on the lake which is where they filmed most of Out of Africa, for those old farts reading the blog. For the younger crowd, they also filmed part of Tomb Raider II there. When they were filming Out of Africa, they brought a bunch of plains animals there that weren't there naturally for effect, and they decided to maintain the herds there b/c dumb tourists such as yours truly will pay money to walk around looking at zebras, wildebeasts, giraffes, gazelles and such without having to worry about lions or cheetahs, or whatever. As long as I'm the top of the food chain, I'm happy.


This was a younger giraffe. Our tour guide told us a bunch of information about it, but I forgot it all. It was hard to get a shot of one of the giraffes b/c there were about 25 other dumb tourists trying to get a picture of them too. I'm surprised they don't get mad and charge. It was pretty cool watching them run. They can actually move pretty quickly.


Another giraffe. Probably young. Our guide probably told me something about it, but I probably forgot it all.























Despite the fact that I think the wildebeast may very well be the ugliest mammal on the planet, this picture wound up looking OK. If you look at the mountain in the background, that's Mount Olongonot. We climbed that today. It's a former volcano that blew out a crater about 1.5 miles across and probably 500+ feet deep. I got to the top and found out that I had taken too many videos of the giraffes and my camera battery was dead. So I didn't get any pictures of the volcano. Hopefully someone has some I can borrow. Anyway, I thought that even though the wildebeast is kind of stupid looking, this is a decent shot.


We also saw a few hippos. They didn't seem too thrilled that we were taking their pictures. They mostly just sunk under the water as soon as they saw us, but I did manage to get this shot of 5 of them.







This was almost a really cool shot. I'm not sure what it needed to make it a really good shot. But I thought I'd toss it on there. It was a lot of fun.







Oops! Looks like the rain really is down in Africa. It just started raining, so I guess I'd better get my laptop back inside.