In the evening the peace was disturbed when the truck from Nairobi arrived with the other passengers. There was one guy from Australia, a couple from New Zealand and seven Americans. I got along well immediately with Alan from Australia and Brian and Maureen from New Zealand. Initially I was a bit put off by the Americans, they seemed to fulfil my prejudices about superficial Americans only too well. One of them, Taek of Korean extraction was quite interesting though. He was actually living in Sverdlovsk, USSR, working with the supervision of the SALT treaty and had broader horizons.

There were two Texans, Willy and Jeff, who, in the typical American fashion would travel in Kenya for just this week and then jet back to the States. Chris and Frank, just out of college, would travel around the world in less than three months. My interest in them was raised somewhat when they told me that would go to India, but it turned out they would only change planes in Delhi for two hours!

Eric and Sylvia was a black couple from Philadelphia on their honeymoon and would fly to Mauritius after the safari. They were working as lawyers and told me that they only had two weeks vacation and were working 80-90 hours a week, without any compensation and seemingly any objections. I could not resist informing them about my 8 weeks holiday and that I would be diagnosed as crazy if I would work 80 hours any week. USA may be a very rich country materially but I was not impressed at all by the total lack of any social benefits. However my adverse attitude towards some of them proved to be premature. They turned out to be quite nice people and I grew to like them.

I had been curious if the Captain would be our tour leader but the driver was Joe, a very friendly Kenyan. He had no assistants, as we would stay in tented camps throughout the week. The truck was similar to the "Prince George" but was named "Puff The Magic Dragon".

Now that we were a full group the food got even more plentiful and there was a marked upgrade of the services. The following morning I could for instance enjoy a hot shower, my first in Kenya. After breakfast we went on a game ride and we had to drive for quite a while before any wildlife showed up. I was getting a bit bored being used from TV to only have to wait five minutes before the parade of the animals!

But we were rewarded with herds of elephants, giraffes, zebra and various species of antelopes. On our way back to the campsite the road was blocked by a male lion who refused to move (to our luck). It looked very statuesque with its long mane and the Kodak company made another fortune when we were clicking away. After 15 minutes it finally moved in a regal manner and we returned to camp.

After a few hours rest and lunch we went on yet another game drive, this time along the Ewaso Nyiro River where we saw some spectacular concentrations of crocodiles. The trees were full of vervet monkeys and they are always fun to watch. We also saw another batch of zebras, gazelles, elephants, warthogs and giraffes but they did not raise as much interest as before. Well, the elephants did, because one pair took the opportunity to copulate before our very eyes!

Half an hour later our excitement rose too as Joe spotted two leopards up in a tree. They are nocturnal and very elusive and we could count ourselves lucky having seen them. In fact I never met anybody else who had seen them.

One of the leopards was dozing on a branch and was not disturbed by the noisy truck. It is said to be the most ferocious of Africa's animals but they reminded me more of big, contented house cats. We could study the graceful cats for almost 20 minutes until they finally were fed up by our observations and agilely took off in the grass.

We then went to the Samburu Game Lodge for some beers. This lodge was very prettily located at a bend of the river with great views. The bar, aptly named the Crocodile Bar, overlooked the river and we could indeed see a few crocodiles swimming in the water. Back at the campsite there was another excellent dinner and I then had a good night's sleep undisturbed by the accompaniment of quaking frogs, chirping crickets and howling hyenas.

Next morning we were awakened already at 5 a.m. but at least Joe did not have the unnerving habit of honking the horn. There would be a long drive to Lake Nakuru 250 miles to the south-east. As we left the park we saw yet another herds of elephants, giraffes, zebras and antelopes and they looked rather tired too in the early morning hour. We passed Mount Kenya and had some good views of the two snow-capped peaks. But it was quite cold and I had to wrap my sleeping bag around me.

The landscape consisted mainly of flat grazing land with ranches stretching for miles and miles and it was a bit monotonous. The people were as friendly as ever, waving at us as soon as they saw us.

We had lunch at Thomson's Falls and I got to see the actual falls. They were quite nice, plunging 250 feet down into a canyon. After Thomson's Falls it got warmer and the landscape became more interesting. We entered the Subukia Valley and got a renewed vision of the Rift valley's striking topography as it dropped from one monumental block of land to another with dramatic changes of climate and scenery. At the bottom there were vast fields of sugar cane, maize and also banana plantations.

At the junction of the road to Nairobi I was quite surprised to see the Captain waiting in a Land rover. Maybe he wanted to collect the tip we never gave him! But he had a passenger for us, Diana from Canada. She was a very lively girl and a welcome addition to the not too exciting group.

We arrived at Lake Nakuru National Park at 4 p.m. so we had only a couple of hours until it got dark. In previous years the shallow soda lake had been the home of over two million pink flamingos but most of them had now migrated to Lake Bogoria further north because of changing water levels. In the 1950's the lake had dried up altogether for a couple of years. While millions of flamingos would have been an awesome sight, there were still thousands of them left, creating a roseate mass along the shoreline.

A sign said that 415 different bird species had been recorded at Lake Nakuru and although I did not count, the prolific bird life was amazing. There were thousands of white pelicans. One particularly fantastic sight was when a few hundreds of them took off they glided one by one in a long continuous succession and they looked like small jet planes when they landed on the water. It was a very memorable experience to walk along the shore in the proximity of all these thousands of feeding, preening, grunting and honking birds.

The park had lot of mammal life too. There were hundreds of waterbuck, reedbuck, gazelle and buffalo and also many amusing warthogs. Because of the impending darkness our tour had to be cut short and we returned to Nakuru town where we for a change were going to stay at a hotel. It was a very nice hotel and we were served an excellent three-course dinner. The service was very good too. After dinner I went to the bar to watch the World Cup and I had to order some "extra" beers as a solace for Sweden's loss against Brazil.