Day 19 Africa  Masai Mara to Diani Beach

We started our last day at Angama with a 6:30am game drive. I dont know how we have kept up with the pace, but we have enjoyed it all. We were happy to find out that only the Belgian couple were joining us this morning. The princess from last night (who we found out was here on her honeymoon, I immediately felt for her new husband) had made other arrangements.

Once we were down on the Mara, Douglas was going to take us to see a pride of lions, but he heard on the radio that a black rhinoceros was close and on the move. He suspected it was moving in scrub areas and took us to the path where he thought it might use. It was long and I saw it a little time after it emerged from the scrub it was in. We waited around 20-30mins and it eventually started moving as Douglas had thought. By this time there were around 8-10 other game drive cars surrounding us.

The black rhinoceros is very shy and moves very quickly when it needs to, and it seems it thought it needed to. In no time at all it had emerged from the long grass, crossed the road  and disappeared into the long grass on the other side. They are amazing creatures up close and wild.

We then drove a way to find some lions. It didn’t take too long and we saw a group of 2 or 3 females with 2 cubs. It was fun watching them play, rolling around in the grass and pawing each other. Eventually the lions moved on and so did we, breakfast was waiting at the camp.

After breakfast we relaxed and packed ready to leave, one last look over the Mara from our “tent”.

We left our room at noon and went to have lunch and check out.  Deb was sad to say goodbye to Farida, the lady who was our butler at meal times, they had a hug. Both Farida and Simon our room attendant who made our shoes look like brand new again and Ibrahim the manager came to see us off.

We drove to the airport at 1:30pm, when we got there Douglas did a lap of the runway clearing a few groups of zebra away from the strip. Our plane landed at 1:45pm and we climbed on board. It is a Mombasa Air Safari  12 seat Cessna Caravan I 208B. There were 3 seats empty after we got on, but we flew for about 10 mins, dropped into another airstrip and picked up 3 more passengers, our plane was full, our SMALL plane was full! And a bit cramped for room.

The pilot told us that we would be flying close to Mount Kilimanjaro on our right side, winning, guess what side window seat Deb had. 🙂 We passed byMount Kilimanjaro at around 3:10pm at about 4300m about sea level, and Kilimanjaro was higher than us.

After about 20mins at the end of the flight through bumpy clouds (not Deb’s favourite, particularly in small planes) we arrived at Diani Beach airport around 4:15pm. We were pivked up a driven 10 mins to our Villa on the Indian Ocean coast.

After we settled in, and chose the bedroom looking out to sea (we had 2 master bedrooms to choose from), and settled in.

We had a massage at 5pm that was about an hour long, then relaxed on our verandah over looking our pool and onto the Ocean. Doing it tough. Did I mention we have our own butler, Harrison.  He was kind enough to get us drinks while we sat and relaxed.

As we sit and listen to the sounds of the Indian Ocean everything is right with the world.

We had a delicous meal and then went bed, we are both exhaused.