Our New African Home: Jeremy's mom visits Kenya

Jeremy's mom, Ann, recently came to visit for her first trip to Kenya. We gave her one day to recover from jet lag, then set off on safari to a private reserve called Loisaba in north-central Kenya. After we were shown around the safari camp and put our bags in our rooms, we had a lovely lunch of salads and quiche.

After lunch, we were off on safari. We didn't see too much the first day, although we did come across a herd of grazing giraffe, and shot this pic of Ann with a giraffe in the background.

Ann was really hoping to see lions on her safari, so the next day we set out on a mission. The game reserve has collared several female lions and uses an antenna to track their movements. It was rainy season, with means the animals scatter far and wide, and there aren't a lot of tourists, so the staff aren't tracking the animals on a daily basis. We drove for a couple hours before we started getting a hint of a signal from the antenna. We kept driving and our guide regularly stepped out of the vehicle to stand on the hood and hold the antenna up high for a reading. Eventually he got up to do another reading, took one step out of the vehicle, and said "I see them." The 2 mama lions and 3 cubs were just beyond a small grassy knoll. We drove up close and got several nice photos, and even got to see the cubs play around a bit.

Back at the camp, we had some food and relaxed by the pool. But we soon had a visitor, a female kudu! She strolled right into the pool area, skirted the water, and passed right on by. If you look closely at the below photo, you can see Jeremy's legs on the left-hand side. The kudu was that close!

Now that Ann had seen her lions, she wanted to see elephants. The next day we set out in search of them. Soon enough, our driver saw elephant tracks, and then I said "I see one, there to the left!" We pulled off the road and drove closer to where two elephants were grazing. We stayed for some time, watching them stroll closer, until they came to a mud pit and had themselves a nice mud bath. If you look carefully at this photo, you can see that the elephant seems very excited about his mud bath.

Happy with our animal adventures, we headed back to the camp, where we took this photo with our safari driver and guide...

...and one final photo from the camp balcony, overlooking the game reserve.

We didn't want Ann to come to Kenya without seeing the coast, so we also took a short trip to Mombasa. We succumbed to a prime tourist attraction: a dinner cruise on a dhow in Mombasa Harbor.