Kicheche to Serian

This morning we loaded our bags into the truck, said our goodbyes and headed off on another early morning driving, with the plan that we’d stop for breakfast in the bush and then continue north to our next camp, Serian – The Original, which is in the neighbouring Mara North Conservancy.  

We had originally thought we’d like to have a bit of a lie in and have breakfast in camp before we left, but the Manager politely convinced us we’d like to go early - they had another two sets of people leaving and more arriving so were obviously pressed for time getting the tents ready.  We didn’t mind.

So the one thing we have left to see is a fully grown male lion with a full mane and without putting any pressure on Charles we were really keen to try and find one the males in the area.  He set off up the side of an escarpment which was just littered with large boulders making it an extremely difficult drive for him and a very uncomfortable one for us.  After what seemed like an age, Ian muttered under his breath that we were never going to find lions in this terrain and almost seconds later we saw two! 

Firstly there was a male and female together for mating (lions mate every few hours for several days), both very sleepy.

And then a single male lion who had been interested in the female but had lost out to his brother.  

The considerably more active single male was heading down the hill and therefore impossible to follow so we went back to the couple and after watching them lazing around for some 10-15 minutes we then witnessed another mating, although the female barely moved.

We eventually headed downhill again and we thought we were going back to try and find the single male but somehow we ended up back firstly with the lion pride and then with the cheetah trio (2 brothers/1 sister) where we had breakfast in the truck.

There is always a blade of grass, twig or stick in the way but this cheetah is trying to help me out on the score.

Much better!

This lovely Village Weaver was nest building.

We then headed off for our 1 ½ hour drive, stopping along the way for anything that took our interest.  

Impala f. with the youngest baby we'd seen.

Possibly tallest Giraffe ever.

And definitely the cutest baby Ellie ever.

Masai are very much pastoralists and we drove through a small corridor between the two conservancies where locals still graze their cattle, sheep and goats.

These zebra were having a good scrap.

Lovely close up view of giraffe (personally I still prefer the look of the Reticulated over the Mara - it seems much neater somehow).

We seemed to be changing direction rather often and we began to wonder if Charles knew where he was going as he’d already said he hadn’t been up to Serian for a long time.  There is no satnav here and if there was it would just say “please drive on to a digitised road”.   Eventually we came to the main dirt track from the airstrip to some town and Charles confidently turned off onto a side track and just as we were congratulating him on his navigation expertise, we promptly drove into a rangers camp whereupon he admitted he was rather confused.