Safari In The Masai Mara
Our first weekend trip outside of Nairobi was a 50 minute plane ride to a camp in the Masai Mara. The plane was a caravan with about 15 seats (there were only 6 of us on the flight) and a single pilot. We took off from Nairobi’s Wilson airport after a very pleasant wait in the airline’s cafe.
We landed in the Africa of dreams and movies. The landscape from the plane is breathtaking. As we left Nairobi the vast plains are revealed and, as we were just entering the rainy season, still dusty and brown. We landed on a narrow dirt airstrip where we were met by a single ranger on a motorcycle whose job is to ride up and down the runway before landings and takeoffs to clear it of animals.
Our safari driver, Danson, was there with our converted Land Cruiser and a cooler of refreshments. The drive to the camp was about 30 minutes of off roading (all of safari drives are off-road) with plenty of animal sightings along the way.
The Mara is punctuated by acacia trees, which are named in Swahili for their resemblance to polka dots across the plain. The land is rocky and otherworldly. Herds of zebra, buffalo, impala and gazelle are everywhere.
We were warmly welcomed by staff at the entrance to the camp, a lovely semi-permanent group of 14 luxury tents, a main lodge with dining room, living room area with fireplace, and elevated bar for sundowners. The camp, which also has a lovely pool, is on a river where hippos live, and is not fenced. We were visited by baboons during the day and at night, an armed guard escorted us to our rooms.
Lunch on arrival was delicious, and each meal was 3 courses with several choices for each. The same waiter, Moses, served us our entire stay and did what no parent could ever do: finally convinced the kids to order something besides pasta. We left again in late afternoon for our first drive and within the hour found a cheetah chomping away on its freshly caught gazelle and then had a close encounter with two lions awaking from a nap. This was where we learned that when the predators are either eating or just ate, we can get really close to them in the vehicle and they are too happy and tired to mind.
This made Rosie very nervous. She continually asked Danson “if the animals could see us” and Danson smartly answered, “they can only see the outline of us, not the details.” While this was patently untrue, it was the right answer.
While Russ and I could watch a cheetah tear apart a dead gazelle for hours, the kids were restless within about 20 minutes at each stop - not too bad. Jordan kept a supply of books handy and Danson was full of jokes. So we kept moving and over the course of our drives the next two days, over 4 hours each (!), we saw and were within feet of multiple adult lions, 4 lion cubs, a leopard that climbed a tree, a herd of elephants, multiple ostrich families, dikdik couples darting around within the bounds of their unmarked territories, bachelor (all male) groups of impalas, towers of giraffe, warthogs, buffalo herds and several generals - the oldest male buffaloes that are kicked out of the herds to make room for fertile young males. We even saw rhinos from a distance, so we were 5 out of 5 for seeing the Big Five! (Note, the Big Five changes depending on where you are.)
Over the course of the weekend, we enjoyed breakfast out on the savanna with wildebeest grazing nearby, we made multiple short stops to “check the tires” (go to the bathroom), enjoyed sundowners while Danson played games with the kids and we watched controlled wildfires burning in the distance. The sun set and the moon rose and it was literally life-changing.
On our last morning, Jordan and I took a walking safari with a ranger and a Masai warrior (both necessarily armed, the ranger with a rifle and the warrior with his spear). In that 2 hours we learned how to start a fire with elephant poop (it’s great kindling) and bark from a sandpaper tree, the medicinal properties of so many plants, how the warriors stay safe while tending their flocks of sheep on the plains. Their knowledge and love for the land was obvious and proud. Walking on the ground was an enormously different perspective from sitting six feet up in the Land Cruiser. Everywhere we stepped we felt the circle of life: the ground is covered in poop, but it’s not gross, it’s just part of the earth, and there are bones and skeletons everywhere.
I have never felt so small and insignificant and in such awe of this planet.
