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.

Why watch it on TV when you can experience it?

I usually do my research before I travel to new places in order to get the most out of it – understand the basics of the history, people, geography, and some about what the sights are and what to expect. I haven’t done that on my weekends here, and for my weekend in Kenya that might have been a net positive.

Wildebeest converging on a river crossing.

I went to Kenya two weekends ago and it was mind-blowing. One of the guys I work with is Kenyan and was going back to visit his family, and he helped me and some of the others on the team set up a safari in Masai Mara. We flew in to Nairobi and then transferred to a bush plane to go out about an hour to an airstrip. It was definitely a dirt strip, but when we left on Sunday the place looked like the Heathrow of the Savannah – it was crowded, and you had to be aware lest you get a cloud of dust in your face from prop wash.

Posing for me.

I was imagining coming in and driving around looking for critters, like driving around the ranch and hoping to find something. However, we caught the end of the wildebeest migration, and the place was chock full of everything. Thousands upon thousands of wildebeest stretching over the landscape, sometimes grazing, sometimes making their trek in single file. From the air you could see the black dots go for miles, and at river crossings they looked like black particles of sand going through the neck of an hourglass. It gives “cattle on 10,000 hills” a new meaning.

On the way from the airstrip to our lodge we saw just about every big animal, to the point where our driver was trying to pull us away so we could get to the lodge.

The family.

I’m still pretty incredulous. We saw everything except a leopard, meaning we saw a very rare black rhino. Lions were everywhere; we saw them on every drive, sometimes multiple times. We saw them attempt to hunt twice, saw them eating two kills, and lots of sleeping. We saw so many, from so close, and doing so much sleeping (or playing around), that you have to remind yourself that they could make mincemeat of you if they decided to take an interest.

I had trouble taking a nap one day because some monkeys were having fun throwing fruits out of the tree next to my tent and making a racket, and banded mongoose liked to use my porch as a thoroughfare.

We had a great guide, meaning he was a fun guy. He was a local Masai, and it was interesting to hear his practical, local knowledge of the animals. However, he wasn’t a naturalist, and that was a big hole in the experience.

Peekaboo.

I clarified “great guide,” because if I heard that I would assume the guy was very good at finding animals. Now, we did see lots of just about everything, but you quickly realize that most animals can be spotted just by driving around because they are everywhere. The best strategy for finding those “must see” animals like lions? Go looking for other vehicles. Seriously. No tracking involved, just look for two or three stopped vehicles and you know you’ve hit something. Lots of people staying outside and driving in do so in the ubiquitous white Toyota vans which are particularly easy to spot.

Hippos are some stinky, nasty animals. We saw several pits where hippos just sat in the muddy water all day. They do everything – everything – in the stagnant water, so you know when you are near hippos by smell rather than by sight. However, they look like they are enjoying wallowing in it so much that you are tempted to join them. Besides, “wallowing” is such a great word.

As you drive around Masai Mara you will see a good number of trees all by themselves, with nothing other than grass for 1/4-1/2 km. Other places they are in strips or clumps. I’m not sure how this happens, though I would assume it has a lot to do with water. Regardless, for some reason I was captivated by the lone tree, and consider it a sort of motif for the trip.