Big Boy the friendly giraffe

I arrived in Kenya at 6am, met up with my friend Pilar who's flown in from Barcelona and we drove straight to Naivasha. It's colder than we expected and the sky is a rather English grey (rainy season) but despite the threat of rain we went off on a boat to Crescent Island straight after lunch. The Lake is really full and the water level higher than I've ever seen it, they've even had to put an electric fence up to stop the hippos coming too far into the hotel.

The island was created for the filming of Out of Africa and has Giraffe, Zebra,cute little DikDiks, impala, eland, wildebeast, amazing birds, Waterbuck... and with no predators the animals are calm and friendly and flourish there and it's possible to just walk around amongst them. There's hardly anyone else there so it is very peaceful. Several giraffe have been born in the last month and we saw ones just a week old. On our way back to the boat we stumbled across a large male giraffe. We sat on a log to watch him and he suddenly stopped chewing on the acacia and started walking towards us. He was very large and we were about to run for it when he started eating the tree we were sat under. We were completely mesmerised by him (and have ou seen how long their tongues are and how they use them to pull the acacia branches towards them - quite revolting to watch). I can't edit pictures here so this is the exact view we had before we got rather nervous and backed off a bit. Later the rangers told us he's called 'Big Boy' and very curious about humans. From the view we had sat beneath him I'm not sure 'big boy' only refers to his height...

Then we got the message that the boat had got hemmed in by lake weed and couldn't come and collect us. After brief visions of a night sleeping out with the zebra, we finally found our way back with the help of some lovely Swedish people.

Two G&Ts down, the night flight is starting to havean effect on me, so I'm off to bed early. Tomorrow I'll be looking out for the hippos.