Day 1

Today we visited Southern Rift Valley. Crescent Island Game Sanctuary was our main attraction. Crescent Island is located in Lake Naivasha which is located in the Rift Valley. Lake Naivasha is a very unusual lake since it's fresh water lake. The Great Rift Valley is a linear-shaped lowland between highlands so usually lakes don't have any other ways to lose water than evaporation, which causes the lakes to be very salty. Because Lake Naivasha is fresh, it is assumed that it has an underground outlet.

 The Great Rift Valley is formed on a divergent plate boundary, when two lithosphere plates are spreading apart. The Great Rift Valley is so a part of an intra-continental ridge system, that runs 6000 km from northern Syria to central Mozambique. When the tensional forces are strong enough to cause the plates to split apart, the center block drops down in the middle of the others forming a graben. This means that in millions of years the East Africa (part of Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Somalia) will split from the other part of Africa.

On the way to the Crescent Island Game Sanctuary we saw a dead hyena on the road. It was probably hit by a car few hours earlier. It was in good condition although it was dead and had a little bit blood on its mouth.  The Crescent Island Game Sanctuary is a peninsula in Lake Naivasha and about 1,9 km above sea level. There are more animals than in any other park in Kenya. And we saw a lot of them! We saw lots of zebras, wildebeeste, antelopes, waterbucks, dik-diks and impalas. We did also see Thomson's gazelles and Grant's gazelles, which we tried to recognize from each other. The sanctuary is nice because all the animals can move relatively freely since there are not fences.

We got really close to a baby giraffe!