It’s Sunday and I’m not working on finger millet so I took the morning off to visit the Nairobi National Park. This is almost an urban park as it is a mere 15 minutes south of Nairobi with its skyline visible from the park … and yet it truly is the home to some very wild critters who are well protected by the Kenyan National Park Service.
It’s easy to spot where the lions are. Just look for the other vehicles. Everyone comes to see the lions. After entering the park we found a bunch of vehicles parked and saw an impala browsing. I didn’t think that was such a big deal but then my guide pointed to a brown spot. ‘Lion,’ he said. I could hardly see it and it didn’t seem too interested in the impala. I wasn’t too interested either in hanging out with a bunch of tourists so we left.
We drove around the park, which didn’t take too long as it’s only 171 square kilometres. The park delivered and I saw pretty much all the big critters you’d expect to see, except for elephants as they need more territory.
We came back to the lioness and impala and after a couple of hours not much had changed except for the tourists. The lioness was slowly creeping up to the impala – millimetre by millimetre. ‘It’s all about patience,’ my guide said. In the end it was the impala who lost patience and bounded off. I looked through binoculars and could see the frustration on the lioness’s face. She stood up from her hiding ground and looked around the tree to see where her lunch bounced off to.
I was happy seeing that lion and we were heading out but I wanted to stop to take a photo of an acacia tree. My guide was nervous. ‘Don’t walk too far from the car. There’s a lion nearby.’ I looked around and there wasn’t a dozen cars parked so there couldn’t be a lion. We got back in the jeep and drove up a less-travelled road.
Indeed there was a lion!
And yet no tourists had spotted it yet. Right smack in front of us a lioness sauntered along the road! We followed it and it really didn’t care less about us but did look back a few times just to let us know she knew we were there. Then she walked back into the savannah in search of some lunch. She looked back at me one last time as if to say ‘Hope you’re happy with the private showing.’ Indeed I was.
