We are back from our first safari!

Pictures will be posted sometime, but I wanted to fill you in on our first safari experience.

We loaded up in a bus and two vans and headed on down the road to Lake Naivasha. The roads in Kenya certainly make your appreciate what we have in the States. There are no set lanes, people and animals are everywhere and this is in the city. When you get outside the city you are not really sure sometimes where the road ends and where it begins. Plus there are more people, animals and things in the road.
Coming out of Nairobi we drove based some "settlements" which basically means tin slums. It really, really made me feel bad for complaining about our apartment; we really are living in luxury here. As we continued further out of the city there were villages that had children who would all wave at us. We felt kind of like circus freaks with everybody staring and waiving at us but the little kids were so cute and had the brightest smiles. We got to see more of them up close on the way back when our van had a flat tire and we had to stop by a village for a little bit.
Eventually we got to the Lake Naivasha Country Club which is where we were staying after a brief stop for souvenirs at an amazing overlook of the Great Rift Valley.
The accommodations were amazing. We felt like we were in the middle of Colonial Britain. The grounds were manicured immaculately and there were monkeys strolling around like squirrels. We took a good sized boat (this is becomes important later) across Lake Naivasha to Crescent island.
It is also important to note that Lake Naivasha is known for its hippo population and hippos are very very mean. His and I were sitting on the front of the boat while it was tied up to the dock when two hippos maybe 20 feet away (probably more) started growling (or whatever Hippos do). I have never gotten up so quickly in my life. After a really long boat ride we finally reached Crescent Island.
Crescent Island was where "Out of Africa" was filmed. It is, not surprisingly, a crescent shaped Island. For the movie all manner of non-predatory African wildlife was introduced to the island and left there. Since there were no predators (lions, cheetahs, etc) we were allowed to walk all around the island. Our guide, Moses, was quite the character. He told us about the time he had met Angelina Jolie (and how he turned down her proposition) and told us all about the wildlife on the island.
We got to walk right up to giraffes, zeebras, ganus, dik dik, gazelles, etc. We seriously walked right up to them. It was absolutely amazing.
When we finished our time on the island we were looking for the good sized boat to take us back across the lake. That was not to be. There were two small boats, not much bigger than the Sea King (a reference that few of you will get) to take us across Hippo infested water. We sat so far down that the water was almost coming over the sides. I was terrified and everybody laughed at me. We made it alive with no Hippo encounters. I had to explain over dinner why hippos were so dangerous, some of our group should have watched "When Hippos Attack". A few people went Hippo hunting in the morning and lived to tell the tail, but not me.
Today (Sunday) we went and hiked Mt. Longonaut but I will let His fill you in about that one because his stories are better.