The Aberdares National Park.

The one good thing about being stuck in Nairobi waiting for our replacement roof top tent is that we have good wifi to get lots of blogs out and hopefully catch up!😎

We were still waiting for the replacement roof top tent so we head for Camp Carnelly’s at Lake Naivasha for a couple of nights and being the school holidays find it to be quite busy with families camping. It was great fun watching the weekend campers and had some great chats with a lot of them. Most were expats living and working in Nairobi for two to four years in all sorts of roles. One worked in the British Consulate while another worked in the USA Consulate. One of the nights there we cooked ups a roast pork with all the trimmings on our Webber BabyQ and the expats were quite amazed at how well we were set up for our travels.

We then moved on driving up through the Kinangop Plateau once again on route to the Aberdares National Park where we camped at a public campsite called Reedbuck Camp. To enter and camp in the park it costs Non Residents of Kenya  $72 US where if you are a resident of Kenya you only pay around $10 US and I must say this really irks me that there should be such a huge difference in entry costs but this is the situation at every Kenya Wildlife Services park. Having been born in Kenya doesn’t help unfortunately 😟.

The park is at an elevation of over 3000 metres so was quite cold once the sun had gone down but incredibly quiet, peaceful and a fire kept us nice and warm before we turned in for the night using our winter doona that we haven’t used since leaving southern Africa.

The Aberdares National Park is not so much about the wildlife but about the incredibly picturesque forests, moorlands and waterfalls. We hiked into to three waterfalls and all were quite different but just stunning and usually down at the end of quite overgrown tracks.

The park does have elephants but even though we saw their large droppings everywhere we did not see one elephant but I’m sure we would have passed many within metres but we would not have known due to the thick forests. We did however see Buffalo, Giant Forest Hogs, Bushbuck and loads of different birds.

On our second day we followed lots of different narrow overgrown tracks that looked like they were seldom used and discovered some beautiful parts of the Aberdares.

At one stage we stumbled upon The Ark which is a lodge built in the shape of an Ark and very popular place to stay. We stopped in to say hello, were given a guided tour of the place and had a great chat to the staff as there was no one staying there at the time however they were booked out for Easter the following weekend. We dropped down out of the Aberdares to the heat of the plains and headed back to Nairobi hoping that our replacement roof top tent had arrived. No it hadn’t because there were still hold ups in South Africa so Marcus thought it time to give Bundutec South Africa a call because their Kenya agent was at his wits end. Marcus spoke to Marzaane who assured us it was a very difficult situation dealing with Kenya Customs and they were doing everything they could to expedite the matter and that it could still be a week or two.