Robert Chew blogs his amazing trip over Rift Valley, Kenya. (Maybe the best ever blog pics!)

Kenya

A trip over the Rift Valley

On our summer holiday this year we were lucky enough to go to Kenya.  (Our parents thought we were old enough not to get eaten if we did a walking safari.)

The most amazing part of the trip is when we stayed in Central Kenya and the owners of the lodge had two 4-seater Robinson helicopters.  They offered to take us on day trip to see the Great Rift Valley.  We jumped at the chance and set off early one morning at dawn.

 

 

At first we had great views over lush forest land and saw load of game – elephants, giraffes, different zebras (not just the black and white kind), and everything you would expect (no lions though  – that was why we were allowed to do the walking safari!).

 

The coolest thing about a helicopter is the ability to just land when you see something interesting. So, at one point we spotted an ostrich nest with so many eggs we could not believe that one bird could have laid them.  We just landed to count them – 39 eggs! My mum was a bit worried that the ostriches would come back and hurried us away but it was amazing.

 

 

We also followed a river and counted up the crocodiles.  We even landed to see if we could take a closer look but we could not find any that weren’t so big that they might hurt us!

The most extraordinary thing about the whole trip was the sheer variety of the Great Rift Valley. In two short hours we saw teeming mountain forest land, flat marshland, salt flats desolate desert, and volcanoes.

One the most cool moments was when we landed on the edge on the volcano – to have breakfast! I have now looked it up and it was the Teleki Volcano on the edge of Lake Turkana. After that we flew over miles of dormant volcanoes in what looked like a lunar landscape.  And this is the cradle of man – our ancestors came from here.

 

On the salt flats, we saw thousands upon thousands of flamingos and pelicans.  We could have stayed there all day flying along with them.

On the way back, we landed on sand dunes.  This was only a short time from when we had  been above forest!  My two brothers rolled to the bottom of the dunes and had to face the exhausting process of climbing a mountain of sand to get back to the top.

 

One of the most amazing things was that, as our pilot Andrew explained, the extraordinary variety in landscape changes not just year on year as the rivers come and go but even week by week. Quite a difference from England where we are used to much more stability in our natural landscape.