Saturday 20 Aug
Arabuko-Sokoke has not been very generous to us. We went for another night drive this evening, and it was even less good that the previous one. Just a couple more of the galagos and absolutely nothing else. The dinner we came back to this time was a massive plate of all the different leftovers from the buffet, piled up in a heap. Yum.
Oh, I have to say though: they make a cracking masala tea here at Turtle Bay Resort, pretty much the same as a good Indian one. It’s the only thing they do well.
In the morning we started with a walk in the woods near the park HQ and saw two brief glimpses of the local golden-rumped elephant shrew, then nothing. This little fella is another very rare local endemic, but – supposedly – very easy to see around the park HQ.
We went for a game drive in the forest for the rest of the morning and saw – you guessed it – absolutely nothing.
Now, Arabuko-Sokoke absolutely is a forest and the vegetation is very dense on all sides, so in many ways this isn’t much of a surprise. You’re always going to need the luck of an animal crossing the track in front of you, or happening to be close to the road. It’s nowhere a normal safari tourist would ever come. But we didn’t even get a single droplet of that bit of luck. C’est la vie, though it certainly deflates the whole day!
We did do one cool thing today. We visited a couple of bat caves near Watamu. These are not tourist caves! Our local guide, Kajengo, directed Shem to drive us to a local farm and then we walked out into the fields, past the crops and into wild scrub, and thence to a hole in the ground. The farmer’s kids trailed after us the whole way, wanting to hold hands and try out bits of English on us. I just couldn’t get over how they walk across rock-strewn fields and thorn scrub barefoot. At least they didn’t follow us into the caves.
Down we clambered and found ourselves in a big cavern that smelled so, so, so strongly of bats, with thousands of them already wheeling above our heads, squeaking and fluttering, and occasionally bumping into us because it was just so crowded. Our own wandering around the cave just caused more of them to start flying. Flutter, flutter, squeak, bump, bump. The cave floor of a bat cave is very soft and yielding, and it moves when you look at it with your torch. If you look up, you occasionally feel a drop of something land on your face. It was an absolutely unique experience, and one that required a shower afterwards!
This video is not for the faint-hearted… https://youtu.be/NlWaPQxauMw
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