The drive from Nairobi took about 4 hours and was on mostly nice divided highway. We stopped at the equator for the obligatory photo op and swirling water demonstration (pretty much the same as this, though hotter and more talk about Barak Obama).

Sweetwaters is part of the Ol Pajeta Conservancy. I have to admit that I was lukewarm about the concept of traveling all the way to Africa to visit what I thought was essentially a wild animal park, but now I understand the concept a bit better. For example, without the fence a cheetah might wander into a neighboring village where a farmer might kill it and rhinos and elephants might fall victim to poachers.

Sweetwaters is a tented lodge, but this was hardly roughing it. The tent had 24-hour electricity and hot and cold running water. It was indeed a tent though and at night it got COLD and we were thankful for the hot water bottles left in our beds as part of the turn down service.

For those of you who know me, I bet you don't see me as one who embraces the whole tenting aspect of this adventure. 1) I'm not sure this even counts as tenting, but 2) it is SO awesome, amazing, indescribable to be woken up in the middle of the night to hear LIONS and Zebras, and other things you can't identify but they sound very close !

The lodge has a pool, which always seems so unnecessary but it's a great way to spend time between game drives. There's also a watering hole right outside the dining room, and it was always busy with warthogs, zebras, gazelles, and a giraffe every once in a while. We left word with the night watchman to wake us up if anything exciting made an appearance at the watering hole overnight. Other tents asked to be woken up if the usually cloud-shrouded Mt Kenya was visible. On our last morning we were treated to this glorious Mt. Kenya sunrise. It's the dark purple part above the black part that looks like a cloud :) but is indeed a Mt Kenya, a 17,000 ft mountain that was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1978 and a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1997.

We also visited the 250 acre chimpanzee sanctuary, home to over 40 chimps with heartbreaking stories (orphans, victims of civil war in Burundi, rescued from the bush meat trade, or kept as pets in horrifying conditions).

The sanctuary has two parts and uses water as a natural border because chimps don't usually swim. One side has a viewing platform and although the chimps were quite close the fence made photography challenging. A short walk took us to the other side of the sanctuary where we were able to observe the chimps from across a small river bank. They seemed at ease as we watched them groom each other, climb trees,