Lake Oloiden – Flamingos at last! :)

After hoping to see flamingos at both Lake Nakuru and Lake Naivasha with no luck, I eventually asked our guide Filip where we would be able to find these beautiful pink birds. Filip took us to Lake Oloiden, which is a slightly smaller salt water lake close to Lake Naivasha. As we reached the lake we saw more or less right away that we had finally found the flamingos and we were taken out by boat to get a closer look.

Watching flamingos in the wild really was very diferent from seeing them in a zoo, mainly because we were able to watch them flying and taking off from the water.  As flamingos take off they appear to be running on the water, it looks really awesome! You can really see how beautiful the wings are when they are spread as well. We followed the flamingos around for a while, taking pictures and watching them. We  ran into insane amounts of hippos in the process of doing this, appearently they really like this lake as well.

As hippos are known to kill humans for fun I actually got a little nervous a few times. Hippos that were really closeby dived into the water and we appeared to be driving right over the place where we had seen the animals only a few minutes before.  Another animal that seem to enjoy the lake is the pelikan and we saw quite a few of them sitting in a tree.

I really enjoyed this little safari by boat, and Im very happy that I finally got to see some flamingos. If you ever want to do a boat safari in Kenya this is definietly the place to go! And now some more pictures of the pinkest birds around! 🙂

 

Speed Sightseeing in Hakone

As Rob and I arrived in the afternoon our first day in Hakone (a town up in the mountains close to Tokyo), a valid option might have been to just take it easy. We couldn’t check in though and we really wanted to see some nature. We decided to do a boat cruise on lake Ashi, way way up in the mountains. To get to the lake, the first mode of transportation was the old Hakone railway. This is a really charming little system of old trains that have to change direction at every other station in order to get to Gora, the final stop.  From Gora we had to take the monorail, before changing to a ropeway system. By the time we got to the start of the ropeway, it was about 4 in the afternoon, the guy working at thea station told us to be careful as the last boat was leaving in about 40 minutes. We went on the ropeway anyways, hoping to make it to the last boat.

As it turned out we even had to change gondols once before arriving at lake Ashi and the cruis boat terminal. We did rather enjoy the ride though, as we got to see Owakudani (vulcanic valley) and mount Fuji from the gondol that we had all to ourselfs since it was already late and even the ropeway was about to stop going.

As the time the last boat would leave got closer and closer we started to get a little worried, but luckily we arrived at the boat terminal about 10 minutes before the boat left. We managed to get tickets and get in line just in time and got on the boat that looked like it had run away from Disneyland.

The views from the boat was simply amazing, clear blue sky, mountains and temples 🙂 It was slightly cold up on deck, but nothing we couldnt handle. It was a really cool experience and Im very happy we made it to the first stop in time 🙂

At the last stop, Hakone-maci,  there was a bus stop where we could easily get a bus back to Hakone-yumoto where our hotel was. This trip is what I would cal lthe Hakone loop, and I recomend it to anyone going to Hakone, but try to leave a little earlier than we did in order to avoid too much stress.