Nature & Animal Stuff

No post since while, I know I know... The difficulty with the pics and the result didn't exactly raise my motivation. The solution, as it seems with all unpleasant things in life, is a compromise: from now on I'll just drop the pics as they are imported into Blogger without doctoring around.

Since I have a backlog of about a week, I'll write about the experiences of last Sunday and Monday (3rd and 4th of July 2022).

Sunday was pretty slow, we still had to recover from a lost night's sleep + going out on the first night – easy, no heavy lifting ;)

We went for a walk in Karura forest which is situated within Nairobi city and still a natural habitat. At the entrance was logically a checkpoint with Kalashnikov armed military and around it the whole barbed wire fence program. And of course an entrance fee to pay. In Kenya there seem to be a lot of those. The fee is usually very little for Kenyans (this case 100 KSH which is less than 1€),  more for expat residents (200 KSH) and much more for tourists (600 KSH). This fee structure applies also for all other touristic activities, but more on that in later posts.

The forest was very clean and we were most of the times the only tourists around. Oh and these colors! I just wish I were a better photographer, but even on my pics they turned out spectacular – the reality was even better! This rich rusty red-brown of the soil – beautiful!

And then the animals. At first we found the body this strange monster locust:

Then this massive ant migration across our path:

At a closer look it seems to be a war-zone between the big ones and the small ones. Or are the big ones termites? They have enormous heads and large pincers. Could also be (rogue) warriors from the same colony? The hell do I know, I'm no biologist! Anyone who knows can answer in the comments, you'll win a price ;)

Oh and since we are at biology question time: is this a baobab tree (Affenbrotbaum)?

Then there was a small dark cave with loads of bats. I refrained from my natural longing to go in there and explore it and just took the responsible choice to just take a pic from the outside. Which turned out so bad that I won't post it.

...

Ok, I'll post it – happy now?!

I even marked the bats hanging from the ceiling, the flying ones obviously aren't visible, since this is a multiple seconds exposure shot:

And no, we didn't get bitten and there is no Covid-22. The red thing near my mouth on the pics of the following days is just some common herpes, really nothing to worry about!

So after bats we found our first monkey – cute right? <3

And at the end we discovered that we were quite the attraction for Kenyans, everybody wanted a pic with the mzungus (white people in swahili).

This post turned out longer than I thought, so I'll put Monday to a separate post. I still don't know where I'm going with this. Right now it's all very detailed and every day is documented – obviously it can't continue like this. I think this is because everything is still new and I feel the need to paint a clear picture and later is more time for just a few impressions and more of my own thoughts :)