Our last couple of days in Diani went by quickly. On our final full day, we decided to visit the Shimba Hills, a densely forested park about half an hour outside Diani. We spent our first several hours with frustratingly few wildlife sightings. The park is famous for, among other things, Kenya's last remaining herd of sable antelope, which we saw but from an extreme distance. We were just about to give up and head back to the hotel when Guy suggested we try the Mwele Forest road, a turnoff he'd not explored before. Again, we saw very little wildlife, but it was one probably the most beautiful forests I've ever seen. There we huge, straight trunks disappearing hundreds of feet into the canopy above like the legs of unseen giants, great spreading trees draped in mantles of moss, lichen, and epiphytic ferns, huge, sculptural buttress roots that straddled the Forest floor like the inverted vaults of cathedrals...and hanging from everything wild, cursive twists of liana vines in shapes that could inspire even the dimmest imagination to new heights of primordial fancy. Unfortunately, we were attacked by tse-tse flies during much of this exploration, but it was well worth the occasional bite (in this area the flies don't carry the infamous African Sleeping Sickness, and anyway, to contract that disease requires multiple exposures over an extended period). Besides, as per usual, the insects seemed to leave me alone in favor of other members of our party. I'm probably tempting fate, but this entire trip I've sustained only one insect bite. [Poor Simon on the other hand.]

When we finally emerged from the Forest, we decided to give the sable one more try. When we returned to the spot where we'd seen them before, they were suddenly right by the road: a gorgeous male with an impressive rack of huge, recurring horns, a number of females, juvenile males, and babies. Once we saw the sable, the Shimba Hills curse seemed to lift, and we were treated to great sightings of warthog, hartebeest, bee-eaters, and more. [We also saw a very unusual looking bird of prey, which we only identified sometime after the fact as an immature Palm Nut Vulture.]

Of course, all of this delayed our leaving the park, and Guy and I had made a blunder in our role as tour guides that morning by forgetting to bring any snacks of any kind, so by the time we returned to Diani we were starving. We had lunch with a friend of Guy's who ownes a local art gallery, and the service was, in typical Kenyan fashion, AGONIZINGLY slow. It was forty-five minutes before we even got our starters. Of course there was no apology or explanation (and in fact fairly direct rudeness) from our waitress. When I gave her a less than stellar tip, I got a look that could take paint off the side of a battleship. Fortunately we had a better experience that evening when Guy and I took Simon and Mo to Ali Barbour's Cave. It was a beautiful meal, and we sat in the lower part of the cave under the open sky, looking up at a waxing gibbous moon...the perfect ending to a beautiful stay in Diani.

We were up early the next morning to beat the traffic into Nairobi. Fortunately for us, Guy is incredibly adept at driving long distances in awful conditions, and his talents were certainly called for this time as we passed the relentless stream of lorries on the Mombassa Highway. When we actually entered the city, traffic was deeply snarled and seemed to be made worse by police presence ineptly directing traffic at every major intersection. In and of itself, none of that is unusual, so we thought little of it until we arrived at the Muthaiga Club and heard from Tracy [Our friend who runs the Flamboyant Hotel] that there had been riots on the highway. Apparently we'd driven right through it all!

We had a pleasant evening at the club, a good sleep (despite a huge rain and thunder storm raging outside), had a late breakfast (which unfortunately made both Guy and and I ill) and then (after many bathroom visits) headed off to do some shopping before returning to Soysambu. We had a lovely dinner at Mbweha Camp, which Guy used to manage...also the location of Juliet's amazing 50th Birthday Party during our last visit to Kenya. There had been some rain during dinner, but on our way home, the floodgates opened, and with it came a staggering emergence of toads. On our way out of Mbweha camp I picked up and moved a few toads from the road, but by the time we returned to the main highway, it was evident that this was a larger phenomenon. The sound of toads singing was deafening, and every single puddle was clotted with dozens of toads. The tarmack was littered with them (alive and otherwise), and despite Guy's best attempts at swerving around the most concentrated areas, I shudder to think how many toads we squashed on the highway.

The next day we woke early to leave for a game drive in Lake Nakuru National Park, but the pounding rain forced us back to sleep. After a couple of hours, we woke and drifted about in a somnambulant delirium making breakfast before heading off to the park. Despite the damp weather, we had an amazing time. I was particularly enthralled by an experience with widow birds (think red-winged blackbirds with foot long tails) that fluttered about in groups of six or eight birds, looking like glorious black and red streamers caught in a wind storm. A close encounter with a Greater Spotted Cuckoo yielded similarly great reference. In addition we saw warthogs, black and white rhino, a ridiculous number of giraffe, and all manner of ungulates. At Baboon Cliffs, we saw not a trace of a baboon until poor Simon was taking some equipment out of the car and was practically accosted by one large male. The big male baboon had a fairly hideous wound on his face (half of his muzzle was torn away revealing the inner workings of his jaw and tongue in obscene, nightmarish detail) and we gave him a wide berth. On our way out of the park, we were treated to another great dose of Kenyan inefficiency at the gate, temporarily relocated due to flooding. Somehow scanning Guy's "smart card" on exit took ten minutes...which was actually record time considering the French group we saw who had been trying to enter the park for a staggering two hours!

When we arrived back at Juliet's, we had a quick nap before heading off to dinner at Sleeping Warrior Camp, where Simon and Mo had sweetly offered to treat Guy and I to a farewell dinner. The evening began on shaky ground with the worst cocktails any of us had ever had (embarrassing when a bartender can't make a Dowa, damn near the national cocktail), and just got worse from there. To be fair, the soup course was lovely, but the salad was basically a non-offering, and the lamb chops were stone cold, fatty, cartilaginous, and accompanied by overly salted potatoes, and stone cold, weirdly sugary vegetables. It was so bad that we actually sent the food back. Sadly, the second attempt was little improved, and the dry Black Forest Cake for desert was inedible. Oddly, the bad meal was one of the liveliest and most entertaining of the entire Safari, and we went home- if not physically sated- emotionally satisfied.

Our last day was mostly packing up and getting ourselves to Nairobi. About this time I felt an internal shift. I'd already been missing home, but I suddenly found myself dying to get out of Africa, desperate for a place where clean clothes stay clean, where the internet and phones work, and were everything isn't covered in either dust, grime, or smoke. We stopped at Guy's cousin Tash's place in Karen [a suburb or Nairobi] for a nice lunch, then spent the afternoon charging our various electronics, taking much needed baths, and preparing ourselves for travel. We arranged for a supposedly seven seater taxi to accommodate four people and a lot of luggage, and were horrified when a painfully small car showed up. Thanks to Simon's amazing organizational skills, we were able to just squeeze in, but the ride to the airport was claustrophobic at best. It was not helped but the almost opaque, blacked out windows, which we all kept rolled down despite our driver's concern that we might be cold, because we didn't think he'd be able to see otherwise; we were, after all, flying out after dark. Only in Kenya! The ride was alternately terrifying and humorous as our driver's policy seemed to be to honk obstreperously at road hazards- including pedestrians- and then aim for them. We arrived at the airport in enough time to have a mediocre dinner at Java, then go through the most invasive security check I've ever encountered. Both Guy and I had our leathermans confiscated and were subjected to the humiliation of an airport screener fingering every item in our carry-on bags before we were checked through. We had been looking forward to checking in as the Gudgeon's guests and spending time with them in the first class lounge prior to boarding, but sadly, Nairobi international has no first class lounge...but we were treated to free drinks. About this time, I discovered that my iPad screen (which I'd replaced only a short while before leaving CA) was cracked, something I'm fully convinced happened during security screening. I can safely say that Nairobi International is the grossest, nastiest, grungiest airport I've ever been through. I'm here now waiting for my flight...and VERY READY to go to England and then home.