Lake Naivasha

We reluctantly left the Mara, possibly our last experience wild camping in Africa. There is nothing like the experience of camping with no fences, hearing lion, elephant, hyenas and hippos ‘conversing’ through the night, and occasionally, wandering through camp.
Drove all day to a beautiful campsite on the edge of Lake Naivasha, where we spent our last few nights living out of our Land Rover. On our drive here, we experienced our first overt attempt, since being in Africa, by a police officer to extort money. We were pulled over at a checkpoint and told we had committed a traffic offence by overtaking a truck on a solid yellow line (not sure how the cop may have seen this since he was standing on the side of the road several kilometers from where we may have potentially committed the offence). The ploy by Kenyan police, which we had learnt from others, is to give you the option to show up at court 10 days from the offence (which no tourist will be able to do) or contribute to the cop’s lunch fund. This is exactly what happened.
In his benevolent mood, the policeman decided to forgive us the offence and said we could contribute $50 for his lunch to show our appreciation. Of course, we said this did not seem correct, and we would prefer to just pay the fine if we could get a receipt. After ~15 minutes of his trying to get us to understand that he only really wanted cash (including asking John to explain to Christy exactly what he wanted – ‘I think she understands perfectly what you want’) he finally told us to “just go”, which we did as quickly as possible, making sure to signal and put our seatbelts back on.
While camping on the edge of the lake, we were able to enjoy watching some wonderful colubus monkeys in our campsite. Also, since our food stockpile is essentially depleted, we’ve enjoyed eating all of our meals at the local restaurant. Our last stop before returning the Land Rover will be in Karen, a cushy suburb on the outskirts of Nairobi.Weiterlesen