We had just left Nairobi with everybody buying beans for their bean bags that needed them. Shelled dried beans were used to put in their empty cloth bags that they brought along from home to prop or steady their camera and lens when using their telephoto lens.
The sun is climbing in the east. Nairobi Park is a short 10 minute drive away. But varied and interesting as it is, the parks great virtue is the escape it provides from the claustrophobia of the city, and the adventure which lies beyond its east boundary at Athi River.
There it joins the main road to Namanya, the border town which is the nearest entrance to Amboseli, the most popular of Kenya’s National Parks, too popular in fact for the number of visitors is taking a toll of the fragile ecology.
The reserve’s southern boundary is drawn where the foothills of 19,340 ft. Mount Kilimanjaro rise out of the plains.
Africa’s highest mountain was once part of Kenya. When the German Kaiser was married his british relative, Queen Victoria thought Kilimanjaro an ideal gift and transferred the entire mountain to the other side of the border to stand within what is now Tanzania.
I was standing up in the 2nd seat back with my apparatus. We came uon a group of maybe 10 elephants a mile or two standing in a huddle. One of these elephants started to get aroused and paid a lot of attention to us. You have to remember these were wild elephants.
This one elephant started walking toward us and after a while I decided to take my telephoto lens off the camera and put on a regular 50 mm lens on. She kept walking and I started shooting frame after frame. When she got very close I started backing up of which there was no place to back. She stuck her trunk and part of her head in the window searching for our beans. The last frame I shot I was laying back on the seat getting only her eye in the viewfinder. The guide/driver said she was hunting those beans she smelled. You know if she wanted to she could have rolled that van over. She was a big elephant. Close call.
