Night Life in Camp

This is an example of the wild night life you can expect if you go camping in Amboseli and if your idea of a holiday is late night partying then this is definately not for you.

We found this local bar sort of by accident while camping in Amboseli, we were relaxing after an afternoon game drive, just waiting for dinner, when a man and his daughter strolled past and stopped to ask us for directions to the bar. The first thing that suprised us was that anyone was strolling around at all since there was no fence around the campsite and you wouldn't know what you might come across, the second thing was the idea that the campsite actually had a bar, and finally what suprised us the most was that they were Irish! These were the first Irish people we had seen since we first started coming to Kenya and he seemed conviced that there was a bar around somewhere. He promised to let us know if he found one.

The next day after our game drive the thought of a nice cold beer seemed like heaven so we asked our guide if there was a bar in the campsite and to my amazment there was, he said he would drive us there because he was concerned for our safety, I'm not sure if it was that or he just fancied a beer. So we pulled up at what looked like a garden shed with a guiness sign on it, as you can see from the photo, I'm not exagerating. Inside it was very busy. It wasn't much bigger than a garden shed, there was the serving hatch at one end with a few plastic tables and chairs for the customers. Most of the seats were taken by groups of Maasai men in their traditional dress complete with rather large knives and playing cards. This was a little worrying as I had never seen so many large knives outside of a kitchen. Can you imagine a Dublin pub where everyone came carrying a knife, you just know that nothing good would ever come of it.

Our guide explained that these local people were working for a conservation agency and were currently carrying out a project concerning the elephants. So we grabbed a couple of chairs and relaxed with a beer. After a while I noticed that there was another room with people coming and going, I was a little curious as to what was in there or as my husband would say just plain nosey. I couldn't resist going over to have a look inside, I tried to be casual about it, which was difficult since we were the only white people there and I was the only female, but no-one stopped me so I carried on. To my complete surprise it was a games room, just large enough to hold a pool table. It didn't matter that the ground was uneven and the pool table unsteady they were having a great time and so were we. It was definately a day of surprises. We stayed for a while before going back to our tents as we had an early start in the morning taking a final game drive before our long drive back to Nairobi.