Kenya 2021/2022

Jan. 2, 2022 - Kilimanjaro in all its glory

This morn­ing we could not believe our eyes. Kil­i­man­jaro was com­plete­ly cloud­less and clear­ly vis­i­ble! Even before sun­rise I took this photo:

On the left, sit­ting on the aca­cia tree, is a pair of crowned cranes that also seem to enjoy the sight. On the right, a hot air bal­loon ris­es, glow­ing in the light of its gas burner.

A short time lat­er we found anoth­er impres­sive old ele­phant, who will­ing­ly let him­self be pho­tographed in front of Kil­i­man­jaro, illu­mi­nat­ed by the morn­ing sun:

In the beau­ti­ful warm light of the ris­ing sun, this time I used my 85mm f/1.2 lens once. Nor­mal­ly I use it for por­trait shots. By using the vari­able ND fil­ter in the EF-RF mount adapter, I was able to shoot it with the f/1.2 aper­ture open, which gave the spe­cial bokeh that I like so much with this par­tic­u­lar lens. Here are some examples:

The sun in the ear­ly morn­ing made the tum­ble­weed glow gold. I love back­lit shots like these when the sun is low. Here are some ele­phants in profile:

And final­ly a small ele­phant fam­i­ly in front of the now com­plete­ly cloud­less Kilimanjaro:

Since we had a longer dri­ve ahead of us to our next and last accom­mo­da­tion of the trip, we drove back to Kibo Safari Camp already at 8:00am for a last break­fast. There we were giv­en a farewell by the camp mas­cot, a peacock:

Now we also knew where the scream­ing came from, which we always heard in the camp in the evening at the camp­fire. The pea­cock is a beau­ti­ful bird - but with a ter­ri­ble voice.

After that we got our lug­gage, stowed it in our Land­Cruis­er and start­ed around 10:00 am to our last des­ti­na­tion. After all the pic­tures of dif­fer­ent ani­mals in front of Kil­i­man­jaro, here is a pic­ture from the road of “humans in front of Kil­i­man­jaro”:

The dri­ve east took a good 4 hours. Around 2:00 pm we reached our last place to stay for this trip, Lions Bluff Lodge in the Lumo Conservancy.

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