Between our first drive and the evening drive, we ate a vast amount of food at the lodge's buffet. The restaurant, like many in Kenya, didn't really have much in the way of walls, and many trees sort of poked in. Trees that hid cheeky little baboons. They had signs warning you about them, but we saw first hand why the next morning, when a man left his breakfast on his table to take a phone call, and gang of them ransacked his table. I'll forever remember the image of the baboon running around the restaurant with a slice of toast hanging from his mouth.
We also had time for a cheeky little swim in this pool overlooking the plains. And a few selfies.
And then we went on our evening drive, where we finally understood how ubiquitous the elephants were in Tsavo. This is obviously a good thing, and came as a delightful surprise. There apparently around 10,000 in the park, but fifty years ago it was 40,000 and the park can easily sustain 30,000. I'm assuming the number is now back on the rise, though as they're not super prolific breeders, I think this isn't going to grow rapidly.
Here, you can see the elephants ingeniousness at work. They've somehow figured out where a water pipe is, then dug a hole and broken the pipe to create an impromptu waterhole. Excellent for them, obviously slightly annoying for those at the other end of the pipe.
Driving around while the sunset was really quite special, and we still managed to fit in a few more animal sightings, like this ostrich and some yellow-necked bird I forget the name of.
Aaaaand then, just as we were heading home, we found animal number two in the Safari Big Five: the buffalo! I hadn't really thought about buffaloes before safari, but I did kind of fall in love with this one and its strange, wig-like horns.
At the lodge, we drank and ate, and went to bed pretty early in advance of our early morning drive. Sleep was punctuated by the fairly frequent sound of barking (?) elephants.
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