The Big Five

Our trip to South Africa in late October and early November of this year was our fourth African big game safari experience. We visited the Victoria Falls area in 2015; followed that up with two weeks in Kenya and Tanzania in 2018; and then spent a week plus in Uganda a couple of years ago. On each of our African safari trips, we have always endeavored to see Africa's Big Five wholly within each vacation. I don't think that is unusual, necessarily. It's pretty much a rite of passage at one time or another for all safari-goers to find the Big Five.

Not familiar with the Big Five? Well perhaps a little explanation is in order. 

Big Five. Mammals. Elephant, hippo, rhinoceros, giraffe and some other large animal, maybe? They seem like they might be the largest four plus one creatures out there in the African bush, right? But that's not the Big Five. It's not the largest five animals on the continent. And if it were, the African buffalo would probably round out that group, assuming you were not inclined to add two separate species of rhinoceros in white and black varieties. 

The Big Five is not a size thing. It's a nomenclature that stems from colonial times to identify the five toughest creatures to kill on foot. And the elephant, the rhinoceros and, yes, the African buffalo are on the list along with the lion and the leopard. We were not in Africa to kill anything, on foot or in any sort of vehicle. We never would or will be. The only shooting of animals we'd be doing would be with a camera. 

Lions (top) and African buffalo (bottom).

We have already seen the Big Five on a single trip before. Not near Vic Falls or in Uganda. But between Kenya and Tanzania five years or so ago, we managed to get good sightings of all animals that make out this sought-after group. On that trip, we were told that the true Big Five includes only the black rhinoceros so it took us all the way to our last stop at Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania to declare our quest fully complete. But in preparing to write this post, I found no such specificity in the rhino's inclusion on this list. So on this trip, we'd be good with either white or black. 

Despite having already seen the Big Five on a single trip, we still wanted it again. We probably always will.

We could hardly have picked a better country than South Africa to do it. That country is so committed to the Big Five that they have a picture of one of each of the Five on their five banknotes. They also have the largest population of rhinos by far in the world and also boast robust populations of lions, leopards and elephants. Take that "robust" statement with a huge grain of salt. All of these animals are endangered. Nonetheless, we liked our chances, particularly considering Kruger National Park, where we would be spending four full days, is well stocked (again, relatively) with these creatures. 

And sure, South Africa also has plentiful African buffalo, but then again, we are pretty much talking about cattle here.

It took us about an hour in Kruger before we came across the first of the Big Five. And sure, it was of course a buffalo. Probably or pretty much definitely the least exciting of the Five. Good sighting? Sure. We'll take any wildlife sighting that soon after entering any Park. But it's a buffalo.

It got better. Quickly. Less than 15 minutes later, we'd seen some elephants and what we thought were two lions off to the right of our vehicle. This Kruger thing was shaping up to be a great experience in the first 75 minutes. We couldn't have hoped for any better start. It looked like we were well on our way to a complete Big Five experience like in a couple of hours maybe. All we needed was a leopard and maybe one or two (although really just one) rhinoceros and we'd be done before lunch on the first day.

And those two lions off to the right? Well, there were two lions, a male and female possibly mated or about to be mated. We watched them walk off into the distance and into hiding for a few minutes before realizing there was a second male mere feet from our vehicle and completely camouflaged against the brush. We never even noticed a 400 pound or so cat about 12 feet from the left side of the car. Difficult to hunt on foot? Umm...yeah they would be when you can't even see them. Good thing we were in a car.

So what did the next hour hold for us? Well, let's just say we had to live with buffalo, elephants and lions for days. Yes, days.

First elephant in Kruger (top) and those first two lions (bottom).

But the first couple of hours in a Park coming across elephants, lions and buffalo is not nothing.

On the watchability scale of African animals, for me nothing comes close to the fascination I have with elephants. It's the intelligence and social structure that keeps my attention. When you come across a herd of elephants, you are acknowledged and sometimes put on notice either visually with a hard stare or audibly with a "keep away" noise. There is no other animal out there that looks through the open sides of the safari vehicle and into your eyes and your soul the way an adult elephant does. We are not important to any other species. Elephants know the danger and why we are dangerous. Not lions. Not leopards. Not anything else. Just the elephants.

Sometimes our watching and appreciating takes a long time and I will say we got precious few moments of insight into elephant interpersonal relationships on our four days in Kruger. But we did get a look at the unbridled joy that is a herd of elephants heading out of the bush and sprinting for a lake representing both a long cool drink and a shower at the same time. We also got a look at two younger elephants play-fighting which looked like it was going to end in the larger of the two sitting on the smaller. That would not be a good situation. Elephants weigh a lot.

But just like elephants do, mom (or one of the moms) was watching intently and that act of sitting was interrupted and very effectively stopped by a loud and brusque trumpet from a nearby adult. No sitting on each other. Don't you know that you are endangered as a species? 

There are a lot of elephants in Kruger. Too many, in fact to preserve the land. The South Africans have tried sending some of them to neighboring Mozambique but they keep coming back to Kruger. Too many elephants in this day and age in a particular spot isn't good. It will mean trouble with humans or trouble with the environment and the only real way to solve that is to start killing elephants. Not a comforting thought. 

The middle photo of this sequence is my favorite elephant picture of this trip. I think it's the sky and the elephant on the left.

If it seems like Kruger delivered on the elephants (and it did; it really did!), the lion sightings were even better. While we missed lions entirely on day four, we got at least one on all the other three days. Day two was the best, with four separate lion sightings, including the end of a kill scene and two separate sightings of different white (albino) lions. And two of the sightings were extended. Like at least 20-30 minutes each. And they were only that short because we decided to leave.

I cannot understate the value of these sightings. We have never had a lion day like day two in Kruger and we'd never seen white lions in the wild before anywhere. One of the two white lions was a full grown male named Casper (like the ghost...) who was in pursuit of a mate at about the pace that I would expect a full grown male lion to act. Meaning slowly. Super slowly. A lion's life is a lazy one most of the time. And that is particularly true of male lions. They only really exert themselves when they are hunting and the males usually leave that to the lionesses anyway. The reason why we left the presumed and future mating scene is because we weren't convinced anything was going to happen. It looked promising for a while before both lions just laid down and looked at each other for a while.

Casper (the friendly lion?) on the move and with presumed love interest.

And the kill scene? 

We have never seen the end of a hunt by a pack of lions. It's still on our list, despite all reports that we've had that the actual witnessing (including hearing) a kill can be super upsetting. For 2025, we'd have to be satisfied with the end of the feast on a hunted male kudu. We got to the kill site about as late as we could have, with a group of lions lolling around fat and happy after eating their fill and watching a (second) albino lion still working on the remains of the kudu. 

I cannot imagine how brutal a pack of lions taking down an animal can be live. At least the cats kill their prey once they have a hold of it unlike painted dogs and hyenas which will start eating their kill before it's even killed. Maybe one day. 

So of the first-hour-in-Kruger-Big-Five list, that leaves the African buffalo. Definitely not as sexy or exciting as either elephants or lions. They are literally like large cows moving in herd from one place to another to graze. 

That is, unless they get a little testy. African buffalo are killers. No, I don't mean they hunt things down and eat them. I just mean that they are unpredictable and protective of their young (and adults) and can get mean. And when they do that, they start swinging their heads at whatever they want to drive away with the sinister intent of getting those lethal and sharp curved horns into whatever is opposing them. I would not want to be on foot near these creatures when that sort of action starts happening.

The thrill I got out of African buffalo on this trip was witnessing some play fighting between some young bulls. We watched two or three males get their heads and shoulders low to the ground and start engaging another male in the start of a struggle. Their horns start in these thick caps on top of their heads which they use to start to tussle with their rivals. They then hook their horns with their opponent and push and twist. You can see the immense strength in these creatures in their thick neck muscles while they are locked into another bull's headgear.

Mating season for African buffalo occurs in March or April to allow the birth of calves to coincide with the rainy season in sub-Saharan Africa. I'm assuming what we watched in Kruger would be a lot more sustained and violent closer to mating time. This late October sparring was just that...practice. There's no sense really getting into it until there is a reward to be had. 

The windows we have into the lives of these species as trans-Atlantic tourists are so limited. The first time we safari-ed in 2015 we didn't get any lions feasting or any buffaloes struggling. In fact, we didn't see anything really super-compelling about buffalo other than a lot of mean-mugging until this fourth safari trip. It would make way more sense to just head over to Africa for a month or so, go out every day privately with a guide / driver and really focus on behaviors of each animal with extended personal viewings from close up. Of course, we all have that sort of money and time, right? 

But this is a post about the Big Five, not the Big Three, right? Where are the rhinos and leopards? 

Let's rip the Band-Aid off about the rhinos, shall we? No rhinos seen by us in Kruger. We got a story about mating habits of rhinos which apparently involves pooping (on the ground for white rhinos and on the tree trunks for black rhinos) complete with a pile of poop that we found by the side of the road. We also saw some captive rhinos in a game reserve next to a gas station on the return trip from Kruger to Johannesburg (or Joburg / Jozy if you are a little more with it). But rhinos in Kruger? Nope. We looked. We saw poop. We didn't see rhinos.

You can't always get what you want.

The closest we got to a rhinoceros in Kruger. White rhino, apparently. Poop's on the ground.

But we did get a Big Four out of Five.

I would estimate the total amount of leopard-viewing time for us in Kruger National Park in 2025 at about five minutes. No exaggeration. No low-balling. Five minutes total. And that was with two leopards in two separate locations. Both in trees. And both did the same thing as soon as we showed up. They both (one female and one male) looked around, climbed out of their respective tree very quickly and walked away. The female walked directly away from us and was instantly lost in the brush. The male walked to the right and was in sight for maybe a minute after descending. If he had walked away from us, our five minutes might have been four minutes.

There is something indescribably gorgeous about a leopard that is different from any other animal we have ever seen in Africa. Elephants are dusty and have wiry hairs all over their body which are a bit off-putting. Rhinos are dusty and usually have red-billed oxpeckers feeding on an open wound or two. African buffalo are dusty and with wet noses and just look irritable all the time. Lions are dusty and shaggy and unkempt and when feeding, generally covered with a little bit of blood.

Leopards are none of that. Not even dusty. They are gorgeously colored, super-well groomed and the most well-put together animal that you can find in the bush. They are sleek and powerful and just spectacularly perfect every time you see them. Pick any animal you can find in Africa. There's no comparison to the leopard from an appearance standpoint.

Was five minutes enough? Absolutely not. But it got me the picture below. I took a few more of the two leopards that we saw but none of the others are as incredible as the one below. And because we got such an emphemeral look, it's the only one I'm posting. This is my picture of the trip. It's not perfect. There is way too much light in the background. But it's the picture of the trip for me.

Big Five? Not this year. I'm not heartbroken. Kruger was an amazing Park and it made our time in South Africa an incredible safari experience. Wildlife trips are unpredictable. The animals rarely cooperate. You just have to go out every day or as many days as possible and look and hope. No rhinos and no regrets here. 

We got an incredible collection of photographs from Kruger. When I started this post I was working off a series of 79 "best" photos of our Big Five (the poop counts!) from this trip. I managed to whittle that group down to 25. There have been 19 to this point in this post. The other six (all of lions and elephants) are below. 

We didn't see the Big Five this year. Oh well. Who cares? We may never see them all in one trip again. Nature is like that. We'll take what we can and keep going back until we can't for whatever reason again. We've pretty religiously been to Africa on safari every 2-1/2 years. We skipped 2020 and got a five year gap between Kenya / Tanzania and Uganda. I can't imagine we won't be back on the Dark Continent in the winter or spring of 2028. 

Serengeti

Before I start this post for real, let me say that Toto got it way wrong. Kilimanjaro does not rise like Olympus (or anything else for that matter) above the Serengeti. Mount Kilimanjaro is about 200 miles, give or take 10 or 20, from the closest point to the Serengeti National Park. It's impossible to see the Mountain from the park, no matter how clear the day might be. Glad I could clear that up.

With that said, welcome to park number five in this blog. I'm sure if you've read all the other posts about our two week trip to Kenya and Tanzania that you must be thinking I can't possibly have any new stories to tell. I mean haven't I by this point seen and written about pretty much everything there is to see in East Africa? Nope. Not yet.

Serengeti National Park is one of the most famous game reserves in East Africa, if not the world. It's also massive. We were awed by the size of Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya at 580 square miles in size. Serengeti is ten times as big as Masai Mara. It's bigger than the state of Connecticut. Go ahead if you must and make fun of the size of my home state but I'm telling you a park devoted to wild animals (and maybe a few Masai as well) that size is pretty darned huge. Serengeti is enormous. There's no way in two days we could cover anything near the whole area of this Park. But we spent the maximum amount of time that we could giving it a shot.

Leopard chilling in a tree.

Serengeti, which means "endless plain" in the Masai language, was established in 1951 as a haven for the area's cats, elephants, giraffe, African buffalo and any other species of animal or bird in the area. Its boundaries preserve about half of the Serengeti plain's total area as an undeveloped environment which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Masai Mara Reserve we were driving around just a week prior to our stay in the Serengeti. There's a really good reason for that: they are the same place. Masai Mara lies north of the Kenya / Tanzania border; Serengeti is just south of the border.

As you might expect, a great deal of the wildlife we saw was very similar to what we found in Kenya. We got some amazing looks at cats in Masai Mara and we did exactly the same in Serengeti. The lions were more active, the leopards were less active and we got an incredible closeup view of a cheetah which was doing little more (although enough, really) than the five we saw earlier in our trip at Masai Mara. We saw two more failed lion hunts (targeting zebra this time), some leopards in trees thanks to our eagle-eyed guide Filbert and a pride of lions so stuffed after gorging on a recent kill that I exclaimed that one female must be about to give birth she was so pregnant. But then again, so were the others, including the males. Lions can eat I guess. A lot.

Lion on the hunt. Failed, again.

The best cheetah pic we got on the trip. May have strayed off the path here. Thanks, Filbert and Samson.

We also stayed in our first ever unfenced camp which happened to be located smack dab in the center of the Park where I suppose buffalo, impala and, yes, lions and leopards might roam. Concerned about that at all? Don't be. After all, we are staying in a tent made of fabric. Why would we be worried about any noises we hear at night after being walked to our tent by a Masai with a flashlight and being directed not to leave the tent at night without calling on our walkie-talkie?

To make matters worse, we ended up in the very last tent. Not the last free one available. The last one in the row. Meaning closest to the grassland and potential lions or herds of stampeding elephants that would surely flatten a tent quickly. That walk to our tent at night was long, even with our Masai with flashlight (and nothing else) leading the way. Because surely a flashlight will help a lot. Although if it acts like a laser pointer with a house cat, maybe it would be just what we needed to fend off a lion attack.

The camp had its lovable perks and quirks. We got a wakeup call each morning with our prearranged hot shower, they had the best bar on the trip (an open tent facing the savannah with plentiful Kilimanjaro and Safari beers) and the tents were each named in Swahili after African animals. The shower had to be prearranged because they had to boil the water to get it hot; the wakeup call was a dude shouting through the tent "your shower is ready!"; and for what it's worth our tent's name was Pimbi, which means "rock hyrax" in Swahili. Other people got Twiga (giraffe) or Chui (leopard); we got rock hyrax. Cool!

Our row of tents taken from our morning stroll to breakfast hoping there were no lions behind us.

Pimbi, or rock hyrax. Fearsome, no?

But enough about awesome cat sightings and lying in bed wide-eyed with fear of attack from some predatory or territorial animal. I said Serengeti had it's own story and it did. And it wasn't about rock hyrax, although admittedly it was the only park where we saw these creatures. Let's talk about the real story, shall we? The sleep I got at Serengeti was, by the way, at no time restless. After a week hearing hippo, hyena and other sorts of noises, I wasn't concerned, even if we were told the noise that we heard one night were lions.

Serengeti National Park is home to one of the world's great spectacles. Each July through September it is host to the great wildebeest migration, the annual 1,000 mile trek north by between 1.5 and 2 million wildebeest accompanied by almost half a million Thomson's gazelle, just more than a quarter of a million zebra and some other hangers-on. If you can afford to go to Tanzania and Kenya in the summer months to see it, and can stand the crowds of tourists while you are there, it's apparently one of the most spectacular sights on our planet.

We didn't go in July through September so we didn't expect to see huge herds of wildebeest on our trip. In fact, I think we only saw two wildebeest in our first two days of the trip when we were in Masai Mara and those two were on our way out of the Reserve. That's about what I expected to see.

What I hoped to see wildebeest-wise on that later parts of this trip were babies, since February is generally the calving month for this species. I expected those in Ngorongoro Crater, which was our stop after the Serengeti National Park. At Serengeti I was focused on hoping for some kind of lion or cheetah or leopard or hyena or something killing something else. 

Then we came around a bend on our dirt trail and saw the scene below.

That's a whole lot of wildebeest in a field. And they were moving as a herd along with slightly fewer (but not much fewer) zebra.

We'd seen herds of wildebeest and zebra before on this trip. But I'd say at most we'd seen groups of 20 maximum at any one time in either Amboseli or Lake Manyara. Nothing like the hundreds and hundreds of animals that we saw in our first view out over the open field shown above.

When we first laid eyes on these animals, all we could see was that they were in a part of the Park on the other side of a river. But as we drove on, it was apparent that they weren't just on the other side of the river but were on our side too. And there were many many more wildebeest and zebra than we first saw. They were everywhere. On both sides of the river and on both sides of our vehicle. They were almost in perpetual motion, pouring down the river banks and across the water that appeared to me to be not a whole heck of a lot different than where they had come from so who knows why they thought they needed to cross at all.

When they weren't in motion, they looked nervous as they stood still, as if they were determined to determine where they needed to go next before doing the whole thing over again. There were black and white stripes and hoofs and horns and beards seemingly as far as the eye could see and as close to the car as about ten feet away. There was no other kind of animal in sight and it was impossible to not be fixated on the hundreds and hundreds of skittish looking prey milling about so close to where we were.

It kept on going. And it got more chaotic as it did. After the scene above we headed down to the bank of a saltwater lake and watched wildebeest and zebra cross from left to right in what seemed like a panicked rush. When they'd finished crossing the shallows of the lake, kicking up water and mud by young and old creatures alike they headed up a small hill at the other side of the lake and up on to the savannah. 

Then, and for a reason not entirely discernible to us, they all headed back the way they had come, a torrent of hoofs pouring down to the lake again and then rushing two by two or in threes or single file back to where they had just came from. Bulls. Cows. Calves. All for no obvious reason now running back in front of us from right to left. No prey followed the end of the herd. They just went back to where they had come from just some maybe 15 or 20 minutes earlier.

I don't know exactly how many wildebeest and zebra we saw that afternoon because it's just difficult to estimate numbers when they are in such herds but let's say it was maybe 30,000 animals and even that seems too high to me. I can't imagine what a herd of more than two million animals would look like. It was exhausting watching this hurried parade for maybe close to an hour. I can't imagine how many animals would be in a herd of the sizes they can get to in the summer months. Our guide told us in July or August the herd of wildebeest would be kilometers long. I just can't believe how spectacular it would be to experience that number of animals flying by at top speed. It must be staggering.

I had absolutely no expectations that we would see something like this so to find what I can only refer to here as a dress rehearsal for the summer months was such a treat. These animals are not social in the way elephants or cats are. I would imagine this parade of thousands is about as spectacular as it gets with zebra and wildebeest. 

Zebra and wildebeest streaming down the hill single file (mostly).

Running in a pack. Not sure where to but there was lots of running.

Single zebra in full gallop. My best wildebeest pic is the cover photo of this post.

At least one zebra didn't make it though.

I don't know if the zebra and wildebeest we saw that afternoon running in large herds were on the run from predators but shortly after we left the shore of the lake where we watched our zebra crossing scene we got a very real reminder that predators are out there. No, we didn't see a kill like we'd been hoping to see but we didn't miss it by much.

What we found was a dead zebra presided over by a single hyena and at least 20 or so vultures. It was a scene not for the faint of heart necessarily but we were far enough away that we couldn't see much of the details or smell any of the smells. Our new super duper camera served as both our binoculars and as a recorder of the event for the better part of the next hour.

When a lion or cheetah or leopard kills its prey, the death will be fairly clean and fairly quick. They'll generally go for the jugular (literally) and make it a last as little time as it can last. Then they can get on with the eating the way they want to. Dogs, like African wild dogs, jackals or hyena, are not so efficient, probably because they lack the size and agility of the cats. They may take several bites at an animal to weaken it or even might use their nails on their paws to slash at the stomach area. Sometimes this last strategy might not kill the target of the hunt but might debilitate the animal almost completely. In this case, the hunters might actually start eating their prey before the animal is even dead.

What I've just described is typical of a pack hunt, where a number of pack members might be attacking a single animal. I'm not sure how the hyena we came across actually killed the zebra we saw it with, but I can tell you what it did after we came upon the scene.

The hyena with the kill. I guess the zebra behind are making sure they keep an eye on him.

We watched two things for what seemed like a very long time in this part of the park: (1) the hyena tugging at the carcass of the zebra as if it was looking for something specific and (2) the hyena vigilantly chasing away the encroaching vultures again and again and again. There's absolutely no way that hyena was letting those vultures anywhere near his meal, except maybe when they grabbed and fought over what was probably some entrails off to the left of the carcass, lending credibility to my theory about the hyena having slashed open the stomach of the zebra.

As far as I am aware, hyenas only have paws and a set of bone crunching jaws with which to open up an animal and get at what they want. But from afar, it seemed like the predator here was carefully peeling back the skin of the zebra to get at what it wanted. I'm not kidding, it appeared to be expertly skinning the animal (see the photo at the end of this post). Once the hide was separated from the rump of the zebra, we could see the ribcage of the animal and the hyena kept going. At this point, we began to speculate about what was likely a quest for some organ meat, right before the hyena emerged with what I can only assume was the liver of the zebra. It was bigger than the head of the hyena and when it had it between its jaws, it left the kill site to go feast. 

The final extraction all happened so fast that all I have to show for the this event is the picture below, which I debated including in this post because really the vultures are the only creatures in focus but ended up doing it because it shows the relative size of what the hyena was looking for all that time and it's just stunning to me still that this animal would get that size chunk of meat out of a zebra. Note some of the vultures are either enthralled by what the hyena has in its mouth or are actually just making sure that he's leaving the rest of the zebra for them.

What happened next represented the most voracious feeding frenzy I have ever seen in person. As soon as it was obvious that the hyena had abandoned the enormous fresh kill, about 20 or 30 vultures pounced on it with a kind of bloodlust that can only really be brought about by the opportunity to gorge on something while hungry knowing that the moment to get your fill would soon pass. The ferocity of the mass of feathers, beaks, necks and dust was shocking. It was every bird for itself and it didn't seem that they cared what they were tearing and jabbing at or what they were climbing over or stepping on to get at what might end up being a tiny scrap of food.

There were so many birds on top of the fresh zebra that you can barely see any tiny piece of what seconds earlier was a kill that had been touched only by the jaws and paws of a hyena. You can only just see a portion of the zebra's front legs in the photograph below and even then it is obscured by the dust that is being whipped up around the scene by flapping wings and talons tearing at anything they can get a hold of. The only vulture not focused on the carcass is the one in the foreground and that's because it clearly has a piece of zebra innards in its beak.

To see this happen live was impressive. I've never witnessed a scene so opportunistic as those vultures tearing at that zebra. It imparted in me a new kind of respect for these birds. Like a healthy respect that I don't ever want to go against a pack of these things in the wild. 

I'll say this: the vultures were right to act with the kind of urgency that they showed because pretty soon after the hyena had eaten just what he wanted out of the liver (or whatever it actually was), he was back chasing them off again, I guess back for seconds or to just hoard the kill for himself (or herself) for a while. We'd had enough. It was getting close to 6 p.m. and there was a Kilimanjaro or Safari beer (or both!) with my name on it back at our camp. We figured we'd seen all we could see in our time there and had to get back before dinner.

Five parks; five unique African experiences. Cats at Masai Mara; Rhinos at Lake Nakuru; Elephants and Kilimanjaro at Amboseli; birds and giraffes at Lake Manyara; and now a mini wildebeest migration, and the most gory kill site we'd seen to date, at Serengeti. This portion of the world is so rich in wildlife that I'm sure despite everything that we'd seen in the first five parks we visited in February, we haven't even scratched the surface. I know I could do this sort of thing every day for a month or more on end. I don't think I'd ever get tired of this place.  Unfortunately at this point, the end was in sight. One more park to go. After another night in our unprotected pimbi tent at the end of the row.

"Your shower is ready!"

Up and at 'em, a quick breakfast and off to Ngorongoro.

One last look at the hyena and its kill. Check out the way the skin is peeled back off the carcass.

Masai Mara

It's been a little more than a week since I returned home from my second trip to sub-Saharan Africa. I think it's about time I started blogging about what I found there so I can remember it years from now. Isn't that part of what this whole blogging exercise is about after all?

I've been giving the subject of how to write about this trip a lot of thought over the last month. And for those of you doing the math at home, that would be since I got back, while I was there and even before I left home and saw my first lion or gazelle or visited my first Masai village. Yep, that's right, I was thinking about how to record what I've seen in my time in Kenya and Tanzania before I even saw any of it. That might seem strange. To me, it seems natural. I'm constantly thinking about how to organize information. This blog is no different than anything else when it comes to that sort of stuff.

So what's the big deal? Why is this trip so difficult? I saw some animals, interacted with the locals, maybe did or saw a thing or two that made my heart race a little faster. What's all the fuss about? How much can I really say about all that? Well, as it turns out, a lot. There was so much that we saw over the course of two weeks in east Africa. It's a challenge just thinking about how to present and memorialize all the parks, the cities and the local culture we experienced.

Do I write a single blog post about all the wildlife we spotted? What if there's too much great stuff (there was) and the post ends up being really long and can't keep the interest of the audience? Do I make it a multi-parter? Will that lose people from post to post or will I have the dozen or so regular readers of this blog on the edge of their seats waiting for the next part? I think, for the record, that answer to that last question is probably no.

What about separating the trip into different posts by park? We visited six parks or reserves in our two weeks. Don't all the parks kind of have to be a little different to do that? Otherwise I am just writing the same thing over and over, right? What about by day? In addition to ending up with a lot of posts (like 14), doesn't that present the same challenge as separating the trip record by park?

Lion. Grass. Masai Mara. Not sure what else to say here.

How about devoting posts to specific animals? Doing that would mean even more posts, right? I mean separate posts for six parks or 14 days seems small compared to the 30 or 40 different species of animals we saw last month. Should I lump some of them together? One post for predators and one post for prey? What about the birds? Do they get their own column? Or columns for predators and prey? And what about the non-animal stuff (because there was non-animal stuff)? One post for that? Two? Five?

I realize this is not my first time doing this type of a trip. Why not copy the same format I used back in 2015? Good question. And the answer is because last time, we really only visited a single park in Chobe National Park in northern Botswana. We saw the same animals from the water and the land and interacted with two specific animals (hippos and elephants) in very intimate ways. It made sense to write about specific species and our visits to four countries in six days in a non-sequential way.

In the end, I've made the decision this time to devote a single post to each of the six parks or reserves that we visited and sprinkle some other thoughts about the two countries in between those six posts. Didn't I just say that each park had to be a little different to approach things that way? Yes, I did. And fortunately, that's sort of exactly what happened. In many ways, there was a different story or narrative about each place we went to watch what has to be one of the greatest displays of nature in the world.

Lions in various states of repose. Masai Mara National Reserve.

So let's start at the beginning of our trip, meaning the Masai Mara National Reserve in western Kenya, a 580 square mile portion of grassland set aside in 1961 to preserve an environment and ecosystem that has been greatly reduced in size since white man set foot in Africa. The name of the place comes from the Masai people and from their word to describe the landscape when viewed from a distance; mara means "spotted" in the Masai language.

We arrived in Kenya at about 1 a.m. on a Sunday morning after a multiple hours long layover (with delays) in Amsterdam. Of course, there are no planes that fly from Amsterdam to Masai Mara so we started out not at the Reserve but in Kenya's capital city of Nairobi, where we spent a day and two nights. Before we could experience Masai Mara, we'd have to get there from Nairobi. That's not to say that you can't fly to Masai Mara. I'm sure you can, in a small plane to what is likely a dirt landing strip. But you can't fly directly there from Amsterdam. We'd have to drive.

Before we left home, I checked out how long it would take us to get from place to place on this trip. It seemed to me that we'd be doing a lot of driving (or in our case, sitting while someone else drove) and I wanted to be prepared for just how long we'd have between stops. The time I wrote down to get from Nairobi to our hotel at Masai Mara? 5 hours and 10 minutes. Seemed pretty reasonable to me.

Six and a half hours after we left our hotel in Nairobi, we got to the Masai Mara gate. Not our hotel. The gate. We'd have about another 90 minutes or so after that to get to the hotel. Rush hour traffic; a little shopping or browsing at the curio shops; some bathroom breaks along the way; a stop to gaze at the gorgeous Great Rift Valley (more on that much later); some slow time behind trucks (or lorries, if you prefer); and a stretch along an in construction road (read: dirt) financed by the World Bank extended our journey by a few hours. Oh, and by stretch along a dirt road, I mean 2-1/2 hours worth.

Lioness with two cubs. There's a third in the tree that hadn't yet emerged.

Concerned about the long trip? Don't be. There's plenty to see along the way. If you go, you'll be traveling through Masai land, which means you will see plenty of Masai wrapped in their signature tartan blankets herding cattle, sheep and goats. You'll also pass through town after town made up of concrete and corrugated metal buildings (with maybe the odd mud and stick building thrown in) in towns that will seem anywhere from too small to support a population to so crowded as to be completely chaotic. You'll pass hotels you might not ever consider staying in, butchers with freshly carved animal parts hanging in the unrefrigerated storefront window, hair salons (or saloons depending on the local spelling) and bar after bar after bar with Coca-Cola-provided marquees and red plastic chairs. This is Kenya; don't impose your own standard of what a town is. It won't matter, after all.

Eventually, and with a 2-1/2 hour African massage just before the end, you'll get to the gate. If you can get by the Masai women selling just about everything while your driver or guide or you get your park tickets, you'll be in a different world very soon. A tip here: as difficult as it may be for you and unless you really want to buy something, ignore the women. If you tell them you don't have room in your luggage for whatever it is they are selling, they will come back with something smaller. If you say you don't like the color or material or whatever, guaranteed there will be an alternate product available. As hard as it may be, it's probably best to not engage.

So now you are in. And you are probably in a place that most people think of when they think of Africa and particularly a safari: vast rolling fields of yellow-green grass maybe a foot or so high with the horizon (whether it be near or far) punctuated every so often by a solitary acacia tree with a twisted trunk topped by an umbrella-like canopy of leaves on thorn covered branches. And maybe a lion or elephant or something nearby, right? This is what I wanted to see the first time I visited this continent. I was just in the wrong spot and didn't know it.

Think you will see animals (other than cattle, sheep and goats) along the way to Masai Mara? You probably won't. These animals know what trouble-makers us humans are and I'm sure they really want to stay away. But once you are inside the gate, you might see something pretty immediately. About five minutes after we passed the gate we saw a pride of lions from a distance and partially shown in the photograph above. This seemed like a pretty good sign to me.

Masai Mara is classified as a National Reserve. The other two prime wildlife viewing properties we would visit in Kenya are National Parks. What's the difference? Well, National Parks have relatively few roads and some are one way, meaning if the wildlife is far away from your truck or car, there's not a whole lot you can do about it; it's going to stay far away from your car. In a National Reserve, you have a lot more flexibility; you can't exactly go just where you want, but there are generally speaking a lot more ways to get close to what you came to see.

You may have noticed every picture in this post so far has been of a cat. Mostly lions. I know the first picture doesn't seem that it's a picture of cats, but trust me, it is. If there's one thing Masai Mara is known for, it is cats. And if there's one huge advantage in finding cats in the wild, it's the ability to not have to stick to a relatively small number of roads. So Masai Mara is both stocked with cats and has rules in effect to enhance the viewing of cats. Our guide suggested we spend our time there trying to find as many as possible, particularly lions, cheetahs and leopards, because we might not have the same opportunity to view them in quite the same way elsewhere. Sounds good to us; we're in! Let's get going on our first game drive. We grabbed some lunch, rested for a couple of hours and then set off.

Cats have a way of attracting cars. Or should I say cars with gawking tourists inside with every sort of camera known to man. The same kind of cars as our small group occupied. Toyota Land Cruisers with three rows of passenger seats (so everyone gets a window) and a top that pops up to allow the tourists to stand and see and take pictures of the animals in the wild. On our first Masai Mara game drive, we found a cluster of cars and headed for it. We arrived at the spot shown in the cover photo of this post.

What we had found (or perhaps more accurately what someone else had found) was a group of bachelor cheetah males keeping themselves cool in the late afternoon sun on the grasslands. They were almost perfectly squashed into the shade of their acacia tree and their ability to lie almost perfectly flat on the ground in the foot-high grass rendered them almost invisible. I managed to take a picture zoomed in on one of the cheetah's heads (above). It's really pretty difficult to spot these animals. Their yellow coloration which looks so bright in the sunlight shows more grey in the shadow of a tree. I can imagine some sort of prey heading for the shade of the lone acacia only to be surprised to find five hungry cats. Although let's face it, most prey animals probably have better eyesight than me.

This was a special moment for me. We had failed to see any cat other than lions (not that I'm complaining about that!) the last time we visited Africa and seeing a cheetah on our first day in a Park or Reserve was a real thrill. I'd come to Africa on this trip with a Top 10 list of animals we missed on our first trip in 2015. Cheetahs occupied the four spot on that list so this was a significant find for me even if they were just lying around in the shade so they could barely be seen.

Before we continue, and just so you don't get the wrong impression about this cats thing, we did see other animals in Masai Mara and we did stop and look at them. It's not like we went careening around the park only interested in felines. I have plenty of photographs of elephants, zebra (first time I'd seen them in the wild), impala, topi, hyena, hippos, storks, buffalo and all sorts of other stuff. It's just that as wonderful as all that was, for the purposes of this blog post, we're focused just on the cats. We'll get to plenty of the other stuff in other parks. If there was a can't miss encounter or amazing photograph of some other species that we came across in Masai Mara, I'd write about it or just show you the pic. Trust me on this one. This same sort of disclaimer could apply to each of the other five parks, although I'm not sure I'm putting it in every post.

More lions. This time with some food.

So back to the cats...

My hope that the group of lions we saw just minutes into the park would be a good omen for us seemed like it was coming true. In addition to the pride just inside the gate (and our cheetah encounter), we would see a lot of lions over the next day and a half. Five separate groups in fact.

One of our greatest hopes about this trip was that we would see a pride of lions hunting and making a kill. That may seem kind of morbid or sick but we saw the start and middle of one in August of 2015 and had to leave right before the exciting part because the people who were in the car with us had to get to the airport. We figured twice as long in country and probably four to five times as many game drives might get us a kill.

In Masai Mara, we were out of luck, at least as far as a kill was concerned. But we did find a pride of lions with a carcass, albeit the very end of one. Finally some sort of gore!

It was difficult for us to determine what kind of animal that the lioness we watched was finishing off. It was definitely something with horns because you can see a pretty big one in the pictures below. Maybe it was a young African buffalo? I'm not sure it mattered. From the disposition of the majority of the pride (above) behind the almost skeleton when we came upon the scene, it appears most of the lions had eaten their fair share and it was down to the last female (with cub nearby) to get the last pieces of meat off the thing.

I always think lions are at their most impressive when they are doing something other than lying down, which they sometimes do up to 20 or more hours per day. The lioness we found with the ribcage and maybe some other appendages with a little carrion left that afternoon was the first time in the Reserve we had actually seen one on all four legs rather than with belly on ground. And she really tugged and pulled on that animal and got whatever last morsels of nutrition she could off the thing. These animals are powerful. It was a scene that was made less gory by the age of the remains and I dare say the late afternoon sunlight shining through the meat still clinging to the creature's ribs added some color to the pictures to almost make them beautiful. Strange thing to write about a cat eating raw meat but I believe that. I'm glad we found this.

Guarding the kill...

and getting every last bite of meat off it.

So now we've seen cheetahs and lions, and multiple groups of the latter. But if there's a cat we really hoped to see in Masai Mara, it was a leopard. I've made reference to a Top 10 list that I brought with me to Africa. Leopard was number two, topped only by my hope to see a rhino of some sort (black or white, I didn't care) roaming free somewhere.

If you have been to Africa or if you're at least a little familiar with the history of people and that continent, you may be aware of what's known as the Big Five, a group of animals made up not of the biggest five animals on the continent but instead the most difficult animals to hunt on foot. I know, the list has a terrible origin. Anyway, the last time we were in Africa, we saw three of the Big Five, namely the elephant, the lion and the African buffalo. We were determined to check the other two boxes on this trip, meaning the leopard and the black rhino.

Leopards are just difficult to spot. Unlike lions and cheetahs, they are solitary, meaning it's generally more difficult to spot one cat than it is a whole group. They are also fairly shy, preferring to roam around and hunt in the cover of darkness (when we humans are NOT driving around the parks) and hang out in the leaf covered tops of trees during the day, sometimes with what they have killed on the branch next to them (I'm not kidding). The odds of spotting leopard are, quite frankly, just low.

Leopard on the move. Really our first good look at this animal.

We got lucky. Really lucky. If the odds of finding a leopard roaming around the savannah are low, the odds of finding two in one afternoon are super low. But that's what happened.

Over the span of a little less than an hour and a half, we managed to get some incredible looks at two separate leopards. We'd find more later in the trip but no sightings equal to the quality of these first two on our first afternoon in Masai Mara. Maybe they were out early trying to find food as the sun went down or maybe they were just moving from one spot to the other, I don't know. And I really don't much care. All I know is that we saw two of these animals in a couple of hours which completely changed my impression of them.

When we visited Africa a couple of years ago, all I really wanted to see was big animals. Like the kind we don't find here at home. I mean hippos, elephants and rhinos. Huge vegetarians that are really scary just due to their size. "Might makes right" sort of stuff. And I got all that. But I also got a new appreciation of lions. Lions are so powerful. You can see it when they move. There's incredible strength in their bodies and despite being not so obviously large as hippos, elephants and rhinos, I knew I would never want to come face to face with a lion without some kind of legit protection. In my case, a car would do just fine.

If I was surprised by how impressed I was with lions in 2015, I was even more surprised by how I fell in love with leopards in 2018.

Leopard number one. Sitting.

Other than the lions' power and capacity to cause some serious harm that I got out of our earlier trip, I still don't love those animals. Respect, yes. Love, no. I mean they are kind of unkempt, especially the males with the manes which are typically less than adequately groomed. In the worst cases, they are a little shaggy and mangy. I feel somewhat but maybe a little bit less so the same way about cheetahs but without the full respect factor. Cheetahs are a little bit more put together but I'd way rather fight off a cheetah than a lion, if it ever came to something like that.

After this trip, leopards are different.

First of all, they check the strength box in much the same way that lions do. Sure, they are not quite as big but they can carry something they killed which is twice their weight up a tree and store it for future consumption away from scavengers like hyenas and vultures. That's pretty freaking impressive.

Second, there's something pretty cool about the loner, right? The solitary animal that has to fend for itself. No family to depend on or provide for. Just a cat and his teeth to survive. OK, so maybe that's a little melodramatic.

But above all, these animals are absolutely gorgeous. The unkempt factor that dooms the lion and to a lesser extent the cheetah comes nowhere near the leopard. The fur on these creatures doesn't project a mangy appearance (like the lion) or a fluffy appearance (like the cheetah). These things are sleek and put together. The patterning is completely crisp and sharp in a way that the cheetah (too much fluff) or lion (no patterning at all) just don't have. They are now one of my most favorite animals of all time. I'm extremely privileged to have seen them this way in the wild.

Leopard number two. The sunlight hitting this animal highlights its gorgeous coloration.

We got some amazing pictures of these animals which I think demonstrate why we were so impressed with them. I'll have to throw a little credit (or maybe a lot) to our guide and driver, who may have shall we say "pushed the envelope" on what is considered a road in the Reserve. Some of these pics may have been shot on grass rather than road, although really I'm sure these guys were totally within the bounds of the rules. It's really just me that seemed like we (and everyone else by the way) were maybe a foot or two off the real path. I appreciate the fact that we had such awesome guides. One thing for sure they never ever got anywhere that would interfere with the animals, which is what's really important after all.

In what may seem like an anticlimax (considering I still have five Parks to blog about), I'll offer the opinion that Masai Mara was the best Park or Reserve of the six we visited in our two weeks in Africa. That's not to say that the rest were disappointing because they absolutely were not. But no place got us the quality of wildlife viewing in quite the same way as Masai Mara. What I'll take away from this place is the diversity of wildlife and the amazing looks we got at the predators, but particularly the leopards.

On our way to our next destination, our guide, Joe, told us we would be making our way through the park but anything we saw was on our own, which to me meant that we'd have to take it all in and snap pictures while we drove, rather than having the car stop to allow prolonged looks at wildlife.

Leopard number one. Showing some teeth.

It seems Masai Mara didn't want to let us go. Rather than stopping zero times as Joe had suggested, we stopped five times. For giraffe, two bull elephants, a herd of buffalo crossing the road, a pair of bachelor male lions and the same group of cheetahs we saw on our first afternoon in the park, although this time in the sun and looking yellow rather than grey.

What a great start to our trip. Masai Mara burned itself into my conscience in a way that few places have. It certainly matches our few days at Chobe National Park in Botswana in a way that was both extremely different and more and less intimate at the same time. We left southwest Kenya knowing that if we didn't see anything else the rest of our time in that country, we would have had an unforgettable two days in that country already. Fortunately for us, we'd see more and it would add to our African experience in a way that Masai Mara did not. On to Lake Nakuru.

I'll end this post with a picture of the cheetah we saw on the way out of the Reserve and a trio of lion cubs. Just because.