On our first full day in Kenya, we boarded the Mystery Machine and left Nairobi at 07:45. Several hours later, we arrived at the aforementioned Elephant Bedroom Camp, on the north bank of the Ewaso Ng'iro River within Samburu National Reserve. It was nearly 14:30 when we arrived - time for a late lunch and a refreshing libation.

One of my favourite palindromes: "Lager, sir, is regal."

We took our meal at one of the tables overlooking the Ewaso Ng'iro.

The Ewaso Ng'iro never dries up completely; it's fed continuously by the melting of glaciers on Mount Kenya. However, its volume varies enormously with the season. In March and April - the wettest months of the rainy season - the river often overflows its banks. But we had arrived during the dry season, and found only the thinnest ribbons of water snaking through a broad dry riverbed.

Our timing was purposeful. If your're going on safari, dry season is high season. In a semi-arid region like Samburu, when there's only one place to find water, that's where all the animals will be. So, at 16:00, we clambered back into the Mystery Machine and set out to find some.

Elephant Bedroom Camp quickly lived up to its name. Fewer than twenty minutes of driving put us in the midst of a herd of African bush elephants (loxodonta africana). We had seen the first of the Big Five.

Of the two adult elephants, the female is the one on the right. She is distinguished from the male by her relatively pointier skull.

Everyone knows that the African bush elephant is the largest living terrestrial animal. But George told us something about elephants that I didn't know:

The elephant's mouth contains four molars. Over a lifetime spent consuming approximately 500 pounds of leaves a day, the elephant continually wears down its front molars. Every fifteen years or so, the front molars fall out, at which point the back pair moves forward while two new molars emerge behind them. Unfortunately, this regenerative process occurs only four times in the elephant's life. Around the age of sixty, the elephant loses its last set of molars. After that, the elephant can no longer eat, so it dies of starvation.

That was the first of two elephant facts that I learned from George. The second came later, in Maasai Mara, when we saw the elephant below, and George told us about musth.

Bull (adult male) elephants periodically experience musth, a condition associated with elevated levels of testosterone and aggressive behaviour. A bull experiencing musth, such as the one we'd spotted, can be identified by a secretion from the temporal ducts on the sides of his head:

Though we didn't say anything to George, The Woman and I concluded there was an easier way to identify a bull brimming with testosterone.