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This past Saturday, we hired a safari
matatu (a matatu that you can open the roof off to stand up) and went to Lake
Nakuru National Park. Lake
Nakuru is famous for its pink
flamingoes – there are literally millions of them on the lake which makes the
lake look bright pink most times of the year...
We paid our park fees ($40 USD per person!!) and drove into the park. This was my first game drive and I was not disappointed. There were so many animals everywhere –
impalas (of all kinds), zebras, baboons and buffaloes. Lake
Nakuru is also a white rhino
sanctuary. Usually white rhinos are very
difficult to spot because they tend to be 1) very shy and 2) very rare. We were very lucky that day – we saw herds
and herds of them. Some of their horns
unfortunately, were sawed off…our driver / guide told us that poachers (and
sometimes even park rangers) sawed off their horns to sell to the Chinese
market where rhino horns are deemed an aphrodisiac.
When we actually got to the edge of Lake Nakuru – I was horrified to find that there were thousands and thousands of decaying flamingo bodies EVERYWHERE. LakeNakuru is an extremely salty lake and you can see the salt layer on the flamingoes sometimes half preserving them. It was horrific. We later found out that the flamingoes died because the lake was polluted by Nakuru town (surprise, surprise). Apparently, a few months ago, there was a toxic leak in one of the sewers – the leak would not have been so bad (i.e. would not have killed thousands of flamingoes) if it weren’t for the fact that the three fresh water rivers that naturally flow into the lake were cut off and diverted early that year. So not only was there a toxic leak, the lake was not naturally getting flushed out by a fresh water supply. What makes it doubly sad is that I wasn’t even surprised something like this would happen in Kenya’s national parks.
previous travel blog entry
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