Roadtrip to Amboseli National Park

Adelle Onyango and her favourite road trip buddy are going on a trip to Amboseli National Park. That is how she intends to spend her Madaraka Day.

And why Amboseli? Bro, are you serious?

Adelle and her hubby will be driving down to Amboseli National Park to enjoy some R&R (rest and relaxation) at a place that Wikipedia describes as:

Amboseli National Park, formerly Maasai Amboseli Game Reserve, is in Kajiado County, Kenya. The park is 39,206 hectares (392 km²; 151 sq mi) ^{in size at the core of an 8,000 km2(3,100 sq mi) ecosystem that spreads across the Kenya-Tanzania border. The local people are mainly Maasai, but people from other parts of the country have settled there attracted by the successful tourist-driven economy and intensive agriculture along the system of swamps that makes this low-rainfall area, average 350 mm (14 in), one of the best wildlife-viewing experiences in the world with 400 species of birds including water birds like pelicans, kingfishers, crakes, hamerkop and 47 raptor species.}

Adelle and Shaffie’s secret names

The park protects two of the five main swamps and includes a dried-up Pleistocene lake and semiarid vegetation.

The history of the park is equally as impressive:

In 1883, Joseph Thompson was the first European to penetrate the feared Maasai region known as Empusel (meaning ‘salty, dusty place’ in Maa). He, too, was astonished by the fantastic array of wildlife and the contrast between the arid areas of the dry lake bed and the oasis of the swamps, a contrast that persists today.

Amboseli was set aside as the Southern Reserve for the Maasai in 1906 but returned to local control as a game reserve in 1948. Gazetted a national park in 1974 to protect the core of this unique ecosystem, it was declared a UNESCO site in 1991. The park earned $3.5 m (€2.9 m) in 2005.

Additional reporting courtesy of Wikipedia