“It’s a matter of hours before we get to where we will be staying for the next week, this week is going to be the best week of my life, and yours hopefully. It better not be a disappointment after all of the tense waiting”
“No, of course it won’t be a disappointment, I mean like you said its going to the best week of our lives, we are going to see things in the wild that we have only ever seen before in a zoo,” replied James in a really stern voice!
The hotel was the best, I wasn’t expecting it to be that good, I mean it was classed as a three star hotel but it seemed like a five star one, it had swimming pools, a gymnasium, room service if you wanted it, and it was half board accommodation, so we were fed breakfast and dinner, the food was the best I had ever tasted, it was African food, things like ostrich which has a really definite taste and ostrich’s eggs which are absolutely huge. My room had a really superb view over the Kenyan savannah, which will be where we go n safari, looking for prides of lions and herds of African elephants. My room was four stories high, and so I had a lot of privacy, Liam’s room was next door and so we could contact each other whenever we needed each other, or one of us just felt like a chat. I went to bed on my first night staying up all night wondering about the day ahead of me, I mean it was going to be so fun, seeing real animals that you have only ever seen before in a zoo in the wild!
I woke up the next morning really early, as I couldn’t really sleep that well due to the excitement that I was feeling, I went and sat out on my balcony staring away out onto the savannah, it stretched as far as I could see. I sat on the balcony and watched the sun rise, it was the best, most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen in my life, it was amazing, the glare on the morning sunrise over the savannah was beautiful, I couldn’t resist, I took a couple of snaps so I could show everyone at home what beautiful scenery Kenya has. I heard I knock at the door and I assumed that it was Liam, so I went and unlocked the door, opened it, and in rushed Liam, he said,
“I am sorry to wake you at this hour but I couldn’t sleep, I was sat up all last night thinking about today, and I just saw the most beautiful sunset, it’s only three and a half hours before we leave for our first day in paradise.” It was actually six thirty at the time and I didn’t tell him that I had been up that long too, it was very rare to get a n apology from Liam, so I just shouted back as he hurried out of the room in utter excitement, “don’t worry Liam, we’ll be off in three and a half hours like you said.”
I was scared, the jeep was going really fast across this bumpy terrain every time we went over a bigger that usual bump it seemed like the jeep was going to turn over, we were racing across this plain land a about hundred and ten miles per hour, we must have been travelling for about fifteen minutes, so we were approximately twenty seven miles from the hotel, this is when we saw an amazing sight, we saw this gigantic herd of antelope suddenly start to stampede, the guides started to explain why, they said that usually when a herd of antelope start to stampede it is when one of them has spotted some lionesses, and so they had to act fast and run and that is why they had stampeded, and then out of nowhere two lionesses appeared, as soon as I saw them I realized that I had to get my camcorder out and start to film this, the two lionesses pounced and began to rip apart this antelope, you heard one last yelp from the antelope and that was it, the lionesses picked the antelope up in their mouths and dragged it away, I asked the guide whether we could follow, he said that it would be risky, but he would do it anyway, I wanted to do this to see the cubs that the lionesses would be feeding and also the big lions, this would be amazing to se in the wild, I could see how the lions lived in the wild, we followed to this point about 50 yards from the lion pride, the lions were ripping into this antelope, it was so gory, it seriously made me consider becoming a vegetarian, it was that bad, Liam who already was a vegetarian, ran out of the jeep and into a bush, I think he vomited. After this we thought it as best to go back to the hotel, for Liam to recuperate from the scenes that he had just saw, I just wanted to get back and plug my camcorder into the television and watch the film over again it as so amazing, the people back home in Ireland would love this, seeing something in the wild like this was just amazing!
That night we sat up on Liam’s balcony watching the sun set, it was such a sight that I would think that it was a once in a lifetime thing, that you could only see in Kenya. We sat up thinking of those people we left almost a week ago to come on this safari, and it was unbelievable that our last day was tomorrow we hadn’t seen an elephants yet and that is what I really wanted to see, hopefully we will see some tomorrow, our last day should be the best of our holiday, it was an excellent start to our university courses that we are going to embark on almost as soon as we get back, we will have memories of this holiday forever, we will have stories to tell, pictures to show and videos to watch. I said goodnight and then left for my room, I was going to have an early night so we could have an early rise tomorrow and make the most out of last day in Kenya, I really wanted to see the African elephants.
Again we were racing off at break neck speeds into the savannah, they said if we went further out onto the savannah towards lake Winderhoo, or that’s what the natives call it, I have forgotten its geographic name, anyway we had been travelling for nearly an hour now and so we were nearly at the waterhole, the tour guides said that the waterhole was the best location if you wanted to see a herd of elephants, as they were always there, because they use it to cool themselves down, and as it was forty degrees they must be there, I hope they were, I didn’t want to waste the last day of my holiday getting hot and sweaty for nothing. We sat by the waterhole for about an hour I think, we saw or heard nothing. Then suddenly out of nowhere this hippopotamus sprang out of the water and walked onto the land. It was the most enormous, gigantic beast I had ever seen, before I had only ever seen a baby hippo at London zoo, but this was huge! It was all muddy and dry, this was nothing like what I had expected to see, it was better than seeing elephants. My camcorder was rolling, it was amazing, but suddenly this hippo seemed to collapse, the guides didn’t know what had happened, but to me it seemed like it had died, I kept asking the guide to drive over to him so we could see, but he refused, he said it was too dangerous, Liam and I persisted in asking, but they refused. Eventually they decided that we better head back, leaving Liam and I thinking about that poor hippo. We got back to the hotel and we couldn’t stop thinking about that hippo, was he dead or just injured or sick, it was horrible knowing that he would come to his end whatever happened, if he’s still alive the vultures will eat him and kill him, and if he’s dead the vultures will eat him anyway. It left us thinking all that night, we stayed up that night thinking of the hippo and what our week had left in our memories. It was a wicked week, apart from the thought of the hippo being left in our memories! And that was it, that night we went to sleep, awoke the next morning and boarded our flight home to Limerick.
