After my last blog post, I continued to edit what I thought were the next day’s photos. However, since I had two cameras with me and the time/date was set to California time, when the pictures downloaded to my computer, the days actually overlapped! I edit pictures by the day instead of all at once, so this blog post will contain pictures from our day in Amboseli! Hopefully I’ll get everything sorted out so the rest of the posts will be chronological!

Our time in Amboseli was incredibly eventful! When we drove into the area where we were staying, we saw what looked like an abandoned resort. We asked our driver about it and he said that several years ago, the waters rose to the point that the resort was flooded. Obviously, rising waters aren’t something that can be corrected, so the resort closed. Nature reclaimed the resort and we learned that a lot of the herd animals would file in at night and take advantage of the protection of the resort walls. It was interesting because the next morning, we were out before sunrise and in time to see all the herd animals filing out of the gates of the abandoned resort for breakfast. We also saw some elephants dining in front of an abandoned building. When I see things like this, I always think of Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park – “life finds a way.”

We were also so lucky to see what would end up being the only lion cub we would see the whole time! Our jeep pulled up right as a male lion, lioness, and cub were crossing the road. Mike got this great video and if you turn the sound up, you can hear the tiniest “rawr” from the cub!

We watched the little lion family for a bit and then moved on. I got some amazing pictures of them! Amboseli also has some insane amounts of flamingos and I really enjoyed getting some great pictures of them! One of the highlights of our time in Amboseli was a hippo fight that just kept going on and on – thrashing heads, circling, wide mouths jousting, and water flying everywhere! When we rolled up to the scene, it appeared that there were two males fighting over one female. The interesting thing was that the males would joust for a bit and then circle and come back to joust. Typically, hippo fights don’t last that long – it’s a one or two round thing and one just slinks off. But these two just kept going at it and it made for some truly incredible pictures! The funniest part was that after the first couple of rounds, the female just meandered away from the chaos and went off to eat some grass. So these two males were just fighting over nothing!

Our final afternoon took us past the zebra carcass from the previous day – the vultures had moved out and the next phase (usually hyenas) had yet to begin. You can tell from the last picture in this post versus the ones from the last post that the vultures were thorough in their picking.

I’ll have pictures from our last morning in Amboseli and then we move onto the Maasai Mara!