Moving on from Animal Plant…

With the “wow, animals” out of the way, a couple of other things deserve some space.

Kenyan immigration was refreshing. It moved quickly, their equipment all worked, etc. Nairobi and Kenya as a whole were much calmer than Nigeria. Traffic lanes mean something. Ad hoc shops aren’t built out to the very edge of roads. Traffic is generally better. There is still trash on the streets, but not on the same scale. Going out on a limb, I would guess this is partially due to a better government, but also reflects three factors. 1) Kenya has a much lower population density, 2) Nairobi has grown rapidly, but not in the explosive manner of Lagos, 3) there is a deeper British influence that left more order, better infrastructure, and brought foreign direct investment sooner.

Do a balloon safari if you ever go. I was a little skeptical – sounds like an expensive tourist junket for those “roughing it” in $1000/night safari lodges. However, it was amazing. Completely smooth ride, mostly silent, and we did everything from go way up to skim 10 ft above scattering wildebeest. Great way to watch the sunrise. There was a touch of the extravagant afterward: we got a champagne breakfast in the bush before heading back. I wouldn’t do it over and over, but now I realize how they get some of those Discovery channel shots panning over all the animals.

I should get paid for this kind of advertising.

If you are a balloon pilot in Kenya, your day looks something like this: leave at 5:30am to get ready, take tourists up at 7:30am, land about 9am, have a crazy champagne brunch that finishes about 10am while local labor packs up your balloon, go back and assume a couple of hours of maintenance/checkups, and your day is over by noon.

Ballooning has to be done early in order to avoid the buildup of thermals and winds. A balloon is powerless to move out of a thermal, so if it hits one it can just go up up up. Gusty winds can also be problematic, particularly on landing. The balloon is also more efficient in the cold mornings since the basic principle is the difference in temperature (and thus density) of the air inside vs. outside.

Plastic is ruinous for the bush. Our camp was near a Masai village. In the village there was trash strewn everywhere, 90% of which was plastic. They have an incinerator that can handle plastic, but it’s noxious. Like many other places I’ve visited outside the city, there isn’t a great way to dispose of trash and there is plenty of space, so it gets dumped wherever. Plastic doesn’t go away. Quite sobering.

A bit of the Masai village.  Most of the inhabitants still live in mud-spackled homes set in a circle with a fence of tightly-growing brush around them.

Animals are big tourism money, and high stakes mean people game the system. The reserve I visited sits on the Tanzania/Kenya border. When wildebeest are in the area and waffling on where to go, each side will set controlled burns. As soon as a rain hits the cleared and fertile ground, fresh grass pops up and the wildebeest start wandering that way. The other side then does the same, etc. Also, we were told that Masai Mara manages the park to inflate the lion population; this person told us there was a time when wardens shot three wildebeest all together to be food for the lions who were having trouble finding game. The tourists all thought they had a great find – three lion kills right next to each other! – but it was really more like zoo feeding time.

Somewhere here there's a bad pun about our ground-level drives being punctuated by an aerial overview.

A girl who has been doing research there on and off for a couple of years gave some good insights on the locals. Cash comes from tourism, but – like many other places I have seen – doesn’t get saved. She talked about a guy who made cash during the tourist season, used it on a motorcycle that wasn’t really necessary and worked for 6 months, and then needed cash when his kid got sick.

Her research was into vultures, and she said that as they look at flight patters of vultures they appear to know exactly where park boundaries are. They will fly around in a park, then gain altitude before zipping over to another park area and flying around there.