Samburu Game Lodge of first day on Safari

Today we started the last week of our visit to Kenya.  We stayed in the wonderful Samburu Game Lodge.  We arrived yesterday, lunch had finished at 2:30 but they served us anyway at about 3:00 pm. We saw a few Samburu men hanging around the lunch area and we found out why quickly.....we had bread and Tusker beers on the table, waiting for our meals and in a FLASH a monkey jumped in between Jim and me on one side of the table, grabbed some bread and jumped across the other side of the table between Beth and Ben before we could say boo.  It was amazing....and he/she didn't even spill a drink it was just a bit concerning...but we now knew why those Samburu men with their sling shots were around.

One of the first bids we saw were these Secretary Birds.  They are a large raptor related to hawks and eagles, they are often kept as pets in Africa because they kill snakes and rats.

  
We saw reticulated giraffes also known as the Somali giraffes, if you look at these closely you will see that they are different from the Masai giraffes that I will post from our next two safari spots.  BTW check them out as they check us out, one is sticking his/her tongue at us!

We saw these tiny dik-dik's their size makes for a wide variety of predators.  They run in a zig-zag pattern.

Of course elephants this one seemed to be tossing water at us!

We also saw our first leopard of this trip!

Here are a few more animals we saw

An Oryx

Warthogs from Samburu

And this Yellow bill Hornbill

We loved this Samburu Game Lodge and would have preferred to have spent more than one night here!