I am never leaving.
Our first drive yesterday was 3 ½ hours and felt like all the time in the world; we got acquainted today with what a real day is like. 5:30 rise, 6:15 departure, 7 hours in the wilderness, a quick break, and then back out for 3 ½ more. There is so much to see. Some highlights from Day 2 in the Masai Mara (fyi Maasai and Masai and essentially interchangeable; while Maasai is the tradition name used for the lands and the people it’s often familiarly referred to with one “a” only; many also refer to the Masai Mara simply as “The Mara.” And also all champagne IS French; it’s named after the region. Otherwise it’s sparkling white wine. Americans of course don’t recognize the convention).
We Reach Serengeti-Maasai Mara Border
We ventured out this morning to the very edge of Maasai Mara; it borders on Tanzania where the Serengeti takes over from the Kenyan Maasai Mara reserve. It’s many miles from our camp which is located at the very far other edge of the reserve, and took over 3 hours to reach. Here’s us at the border! We were baddies and jumped over to the other side for 10 seconds so we could put a Tanzania pin in our map back at home. Apparently a cheetah in the park doesn’t think much of the dividing line between the reserve territories because he pooped on top of the sign.
The Wildebeest Migration Blows Our Minds
We’ve been lucky enough to arrive to Maasai Mara on the tail end of the great migration, where more than 2 million wildebeest and their Zebra friends will make the 300-ish mile trek back to their home in the Serenghetti for the winter and early spring. Erick pointed out the baby beests who were born here in the Maasai Mara and are making their very first migration back to what will be home; meanwhile we just hung out from the Land Cruiser with our mouths open watching these creatures self-organize into nearly single file lines a mile long, stopping and clustering up every 10 minutes or so to hang out and graze before filing back up and moving on. Seeing these animals doing their thing is mindblowing.
Cheetahs Appear Everywhere
We’re still on the hunt for a leopard to complete The Big Five, but we’ve been making it up with all the cheetah luck in the world. Our count is up to four; today was pretty spectacular. There are around 14 cheetah in the park in total, and we’ve seen about a third of them. Cheetah-hanging-out-in-tree this morning; cheetah brothers making their way to some tree sleeping about an hour later. Like our dog Odie, cheetahs pee on everything all the time to mark their territory. I did my 3rd grade Endangered Animals report on these guys and haven’t looked back since; still my favorite animal of the safari so far.
Lions Do All The Things We Wished They Would Do
The second reward for venturing so far beyond where we’d been the day before (it feels like Westworld out here and every day you pick some new adventure that gets you farther into “The Game”) is that we came up on a tiny little desert oasis that looked like it was out of a children’s cartoon about animals who live in the African plains – I mean The Lion King – where two full grown lions were hanging out and courting one another. The lioness did a lot of yawning and slinking, the lion did a lot of following and attempting to mate – at which point the lioness would snarl and growl at him (it sounds like it’s through a megaphone). Erick tells us that this is akin to saying “back off, nerd! Hands off THIS!” The lions wandered around the 30-foot-wide oasis and did much posing and modeling for us and I could not have been more thrilled.
Hyenas Are Sweet
Highlight #3 was surprising – it was our first hyena sighting paired with Kevin’s and my immediate mutual desire to have a Myrna as a pet. They are disarmingly cute until you zoom in on their creepy ass permanent-snarl underbite and Erick reminds you that they rank only under the lion in terms of predatory dominance in the ecosystem and their specialty is sniffing out weak, solitary animals whom they can destroy. When they are walking amongst healthy, dense herds of animals like zebra and giraffe and buffalo, they just wander right on by and neither the hyenas nor their neighbors raise an eyebrow.
HIPPO FIGHTS!!!
I’m lying we didn’t see one but don’t worry, I got tricked as well. We did our evening drive into the darkness and used big spotlights to try and find leopards; we failed there but managed to spot a super rare serval cat (imagine a teeny tiny leopard-cheetah mix that you’d maybe like to pet but are also scared of) and a bunch of hippos crossing the “Hippo Highway” which is a well-beaten path made by dozens of hippos on their nightly grazing pilgrimage from their water holes to the grass and bushes. I asked Erick how much hippos weigh and he casually pointed to a big one in front of us and said, “maybe about 3 tons?” Just in case you forget how much 3 tons adds up to, it’s 6,000 pounds. My car weighs one ton. Mind blown. Again. Stop it you mind-blowing Maasai Mara. So anyway right after he points out this 3 ton hippo who he says can get really aggressive if you get in its path, he shouts “oh wait my colleague just radioed in and there’s a hippo fight we need to go see it hold on!” And with that we shot through the African forest toward two 3 ton death machines that were fighting and were probably then going to fight and mruder us except PSYCH instead he drove us into a torch and lantern-lit bush dinner that they set up in the middle of nowhere for us and it was just the bee’s knees. I ate some goat and felt bad about it but got over it pretty quickly.
More tomorrow as we explore the river banks for hippos and Nile crocodile, head toward the east edges of the park, and search for the last remaining Big Five – rhinos and leopards!
