The Masai

Before I visited Kenya, I had never thought of setting foot in a house made out of cow dung. I did it anyway, and then felt bad afterwards for deliberately not touching the walls while I was inside. I spent maybe 15 minutes sitting on a very low seat that stretched the limit of my knees learning about the people who had invited me into their house. I also learned in a land where building materials are scarce and a three or four or six foot high termite mound is a common sight, cattle poop is apparently useful as a readily available termite-resistant building material. If that's all there is to build with, I guess you have to use it.

This, to me, is why we travel.

Visit Kenya and you'll find yourself in a land made up of 47 different tribes. There is absolutely no sense behind why these 47 tribes are amalgamated into one 21st century country other than that's where white men who had little real understanding of the history or importance of this land drew some lines to show other white men where their land started and someone else's stopped. Think 47 different tribes sounds like a chaotic mess to draw a country's borders around? Head south into Tanzania and you'll be in a nation composed of over 120 different tribes. Crazy, right?

Based on our one week each in Kenya and Tanzania this past February, I would struggle to name the largest, second largest or smallest or middle sized tribe in either country. We spent one week with two Kenyans (our guide, Joseph, and driver, Peter) and the same amount of time with two Tanzanians (our guide, Filbert, and driver, Samson) and I couldn't tell you what tribe each of those four men hailed from. Joe even explained the whole thing to us and I still couldn't tell you and I swear I was paying attention.

For the limited amount of time we spent in East Africa this year most of these 160ish tribes were invisible to us. They were all around us and registered very little in my memory. They all pretty much looked the same. They were store clerks or lawyers or tourist guides or drivers or customs agents or chefs or janitors or park rangers or motorcycle or car repairers or doctors or millions of other different things. They all looked similar to one another in the way they dressed and walked and interacted with us. All of them except one tribe: the Masai.

A line of Masai women trying to out-do their male counterparts. 

We went to Africa earlier this year thinking we knew a thing or two about the Masai. Legendary lion killers who confronted the kings of the jungle armed only with spears. Warriors with famous constitutions who can run for miles at a time without tiring. Nomadic tribesmen who exist on a diet of blood and milk and little else. Resisters of change determined to not conform to other people's vision of progress. All of those things turned out to be myths and truths at the same time. And then we found out so much more.

The Masai are both one of the 47 tribes incorporated into Kenya's population and one of the 120 within Tanzania's border. The funny thing about drawing lines arbitrarily on a map in a place you just got to is that some of the folks you are trying to define as Kenyans or Tanzanians aren't going to see themselves the way someone else sees them. The Masai's traditional land is in Kenya. It's also in Tanzania. They move freely between the two countries pretty much as they used to, although I'm sure in reality it's not really the same as it was centuries ago.

We had the opportunity to spend time with the Masai in both Kenya and Tanzania. We took the opportunity to do so in both lands, once near the Masai Mara National Reserve and once near Lake Manyara National Park. Both villages were similar and both were different but in our time in Africa this year, it seemed like the Masai were everywhere. I'm sure it seemed that way because the places we went were pretty much all in and around the Masai's lands. But we found some further apart too.

Masai children welcoming us into their village.

The Masai are about impossible to miss. Tall, slender men standing stock still in the middle of fields wrapped in red, blue, purple, orange or any other brightly colored checkered patterned blankets or shuka cloth. The cloths are likely 20th century substitutes for traditional leather goods used by the Masai for protection from the wind and other elements. How the Masai gave up their leather for these synthetic blankets is uncertain. Maybe they fell in love with tartan blankets traded with Scottish missionaries. Maybe they got them earlier than the 1900s by trading with people from the coast. Maybe it was something else. Wherever they came from, they make the Masai watching over livestock stick out visibly against the savannah. Visible to their flocks and herds and also to the predators that might do them harm.

These tartan warriors were impossible to miss on our first drive outside Nairobi on our way to Masai Mara National Reserve. Whether they were in fields or by the sides of the roads pushing their goat or cattle or sheep or all three along to find more food, they were obvious as they steered their animals using little more than what looks like a twig from an olive tree. We saw no spear carrying warriors. I have no idea really how they fend off large cats with those little sticks.

The sheep and goats are food. The cattle are not. Well, not in the sense that you and I might think of killing a cow for steaks or hamburgers or whatever else would tide us over with sustenance until they were gone. It's the cattle that are the thing with the Masai. They serve as a source of milk and blood and they are tangible symbols of wealth in their society. The milk makes sense; they get it just the way we do from the udders of the cows. The blood they will drink in a sustainable way, draining just enough from each cow to add more nutrition to their diets while keeping the cattle alive to generate more by feeding and continuing to grow.

The cattle that are the lifeblood of the Masai.

The cattle pen, for safekeeping at night.

The Masai used to be nomadic or semi-nomadic, moving around the savannah with their animals. Now they are really semi-nomadic or permanently rooted in settlements that stay put, more or less, in the same spot for a long time.

Their villages are roughly circular in form and are composed based on our experience from circular or rectilinear houses made of whatever the Masai have available to them to build with: sticks, grass and cattle dung with wooden or latticed together doors. These are not dwellings that families hang out in. They are used for sleeping, cooking and protection from the elements. That last part not just for the Masai but sometimes for their baby cows.

There are maybe two or three or four or five rooms in any one house, which are built by the Masai women. Not necessarily because the men are lazy but because they are generally off away from the village by day watching over their animals. That's probably less stressful and demanding work than building a house (or cooking in that completed house for that matter) but if there's ever a need to defend the livestock, I guess you need the strongest possible guardians out there with them.

Outside the houses there has to be a space to keep the herds safe at night. In the Kenyan village we visited, the entire village was enclosed and gated with the perimeter walls made from acacia tree branches with plenty of long, sharp thorns. The village in Tanzania was not fenced completely but there was gated enclosure (also made from the thorny acacia trees) to pen the cattle, goats and sheep at night. The difference? The first village was right outside Masai Mara National Reserve, home to lions and leopards; the second was not which presumably allowed a little less security to be employed.

If the story we were told about the village near Masai Mara was correct, namely that the Masai do such an effective job of warding off lions that zebra from the park often huddle near the perimeter walls of the enclosure, then the Masai must be on to something.

Masai women building a new chimney.

Masai houses are dark. There's no electricity and therefore no lights and their building materials of choice (twigs and dung) do not allow large open expanses of windows. And if they did, they probably wouldn't take advantage of that fact because windows for people without access to glass doesn't really protect against the weather that well, which is part of the point of these houses in the first place. After we ducked to enter the dwelling, we found our way to where we were told to sit all the while conspicuously (to me) not trying to use our hands on the walls for support.

The house we sat in was a rectilinear structure built by one of the wives of an important Masai. One house, one wife. One Masai man might have multiple houses, meaning multiple wives. I get that this concept may be contrary to the way our society views relations between men and women. Let's not get caught up in that in this post. This was clearly not our country. Let's not try to evaluate other people according to our own standards. At least for the remainder of this post, anyway. Thank you.

In addition to being dark, the place was tiny. I couldn't stand upright in the place due to the roof height and I couldn't imagine sleeping in one of the bedrooms, which seemed to me in the almost darkness to be little bigger than a ship's bunk. The beds were inches off the dirt floor and the rooms were far smaller than the baby cattle's room we passed on our way in. Later we'd spend time in taller circular houses but which were smaller in footprint, presumably due to the sloped reeds used to form the roof; reeds can only span so far I guess.

While we sat and learned, the stove in the house was on, cooking something in a pan or pot. And by stove, I mean an open fire stoked with wood. In a house with very small openings in the walls to admit light. Or to let smoke exit. And it was smoky. So smoky in fact that I guess it was understandable on some level that the women who spend all day watching over a pot of boiling beans refueling the stove have significant respiratory issues and a problem with cancer from inhaling fumes kicked up by burning logs.

While I'm all for not imposing our own standards of living on people living in places other than the United States, I was honestly shocked to hear about cancer and respiratory issues in places as remote and relatively unspoiled like Kenya and Tanzania. Fortunately, in this instance, G Adventures, our hosts for the two week trip we were on, were not ones to stand by and let this continue to happen unchecked.

Enter the Clean Cookstove Project, an initiative by G Adventures' charity arm Planeterra, with a solution for those Masai women that want to improve their quality of life in a relatively simple way. The Project involves a self installed chimney and improved concrete stove to direct the smoke and ash that burns off the fuel for the daily cooking. In addition to being three times as efficient (which means 2/3 fewer trips for firewood), the stove and chimney assemblies exhaust up to 90% of the dangerous fumes the women will breathe in while presiding over their meals which cook for hours.

The solution is deceptively simple and super low cost. The average installation runs about the equivalent of $60 U.S. dollars and it's subsidized. The only issue, of course, is that most Masai don't have much money, so the women's half has to come from some savings and hard work. The silver lining to that struggle is that the Project will pay the women who build the chimneys for their work to improve their own lives. It's a circle that can be self-sustaining if worked correctly. I'm not saying it's easy necessarily, but it's something that can provide great value for a little investment. We were able to watch a team of women constructing a chimney for fifteen minutes at our stop in Tanzania. It's crude but effective construction. And effective counts here.

How many Masai does it take to start a fire?

Ultimately, the answer turned out to be one. Too many cooks in the kitchen in the first photo.

The Clean Cookstove Project is an example of the Masai embracing the 21st (or 20th, if you prefer) century on their own terms. While they have largely resisted western notions of progress in a number of areas, they are clearly willing to bend their lifestyles a little when it suits them. While they cling to traditional ways of life, most Masai carry cellphones and in the first village we visited there were a number of portable solar light fixtures charging on the dung and reed roofs. There may be no plumbing in their houses, but they recognize the need for a light source so their children can do their homework at night. I'm not sure if most Masai use elephant dung, a stick and a knife to start a fire like we were shown in one of our visits, but if they do, that seemed to work when we were there.

I wrote earlier in this post that we knew a little something about the Masai before we set foot in East Africa. Warriors. Runners. Shepherds. Traditionalists. We didn't know about the chimneys and we didn't know about the portable lights. But we did know they jumped. And we got an up close look.

I get that this demonstration was put on solely for our benefit, but the line of young Masai men who took turns showing us how high they can jump was truly one of the more impressive displays I have seen on my travels. This ages old tradition is intended to demonstrate strength for potential wives and some of these guys can get some air, especially given their jumping form which involves being wrapped in a blanket and jumping straight vertical using (at least it seemed this way to me) just the strength in their lower legs and ankles.

This is truly difficult. I think the picture at the top of this post is me at my maximum vertical leap of about six inches. Our Kenyan guide, Joe, claimed I wasn't even jumping but check it out because the evidence is clear: there's definitely some separation between my boots and my shadow. Yes, I'm not winning many wives with this sort of junior varsity level effort but I'm wearing way more than the Masai out jumping me and I'm way older than these much younger men. Fortunately, I don't have to be the highest jumper in order to find the love of my life. I'd be in trouble if I did.

After our time with the Masai and the animals in six parks, our last day in Africa this year was spent in Arusha, Tanzania. The last person we spent any appreciable amount of time with in Kenya or Tanzania was a Masai named Isaac. If we had seen the Masai as fierce stalwarts of traditionalism refusing to adapt their lifestyle to what other people from elsewhere in the world see as a correct way to live, Isaac provided a counterpoint to that argument.

He was our guide around the chaos that is Arusha, taking us from curio shop to curio shop looking for cheap souvenirs and maybe a piece or two of Tanzanite, a local purple-blue precious stone that is more rare than diamonds. Isaac didn't look like the Masai we visited in the two villages earlier in our trip. He wore no shuka cloth, carried no stick and was not herding livestock. He is one of 15 children of his Masai father. His mom is his dad's second wife. He and all his brothers and sisters from his dad's three wives have moved away from home and chosen to live their lives in a non-traditional way. With the unemployment rate in parts of Kenya and Tanzania at 40%, this is perhaps a brave thing to do. But it's also potentially a sign of what is to come more and more for the Masai.

In meeting Isaac and having him guide us around the city for a half a day or so, we got to see a different side to these people and I think it was valuable for us. It made us see beyond the stereotype that visiting the two villages might have reinforced for us. The day we spent walking around Arusha was the hottest day we spent in Africa. We sweated. We needed water. We needed shade. We needed rest. We ultimately had to beg off the walk back to where we were dropped off in favor of our driver coming to get us. Isaac didn't break a sweat the whole time. We thought of the Masai as warriors with famous constitutions. Yep, Isaac was for sure a Masai.

Up In The Air

I'd never flown in a hot air balloon before. Somehow it seemed like the natural spot to try this for the first time was in a place where we'd be landing somewhere on a vast plain of grass which might be visited that day (or even at the very moment we touched down) by wild animals like lions, hyena and leopards. Hey, there's a first time for everything. Sure! Why not?

Most everything about our trip to Kenya and Tanzania was planned in advance with very little ability to do something different from what was scripted. We had a free day on the front end of the trip in Nairobi and a similarly free day on the last day in Arusha. In between, we traveled as a group pretty much everywhere with all five (in Kenya) or six (in Tanzania) of us doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.

But there were a couple of opportunities to engage in optional activities. Two of the three or four options involved flying in a hot air balloon above the savannah either at Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya or Serengeti National Park in Tanzania or both. We figured this was something we just couldn't pass up. We also figured once would be enough (these things are expensive) so we signed up for the cheaper of the two at Masai Mara. Exciting stuff!

So about that heights thing. I'm not particularly crazy about them. In fact, I might not like them much at all.

Firing up the engine!

At about 6 a.m. when it's pretty much pitch black and you can't see what's lurking in the grass (are there snakes out there?) and there are hippo noises coming from the trees about 30 feet from you, comfort at heights is really one of the furthest things from your mind. If it weren't for the eight or ten guys directing a giant flame into an enormous oh so flimsy looking balloon to get it to inflate that is. Will this thing really stay up there and not catch fire?

The flame was hot by the way. Like really hot. Despite the heat, I inched (or maybe footed or yarded) a bit closer to the balloon after hearing the hippo. Putting a few more feet (and maybe even a person or two) between me and a hippo is worth getting a little bit of a burn. In the end, nobody got charged by a hippo or burned but I still don't like those hippo grunts.

By the way, can you see the basket in the picture above? It's actually a basket. Like made of wicker. I'm going up in the air in that thing? Like 1,000 feet above the surface of the Earth? I'm sure it's safe, right? These people are professionals, right?

I eventually stopped being a baby and climbed in. If you look carefully in the photo above, you can see there are already some people in the basket. They had to get in there on their backs while the thing was on its side and then get tipped rudely into their current place. It did not look comfortable. At least I didn't have to do that.

Aloft with Captain Barnabas.

I think it's important when we travel that we try to see the places we go from as many perspectives as possible. In some cases, this means talking to people who live and work where we are visiting to understand their perspective on life or deliberately visiting somewhere non-touristy. Other times, it literally means seeing where we are from a different angle for ourselves. I wanted to take this balloon ride because I wanted to see the grassland that we spent a couple of days each in Kenya and Tanzania not from ground level but from above and see if it looked any different or if my perception of where I was changed. Sometimes when I travel I can get this different perspective by climbing up or taking an elevator up to the top of a tall building. Can't really do that in Masai Mara National Reserve so we were left with climbing an acacia tree or trusting a wicker basket with a dozen or so other people suspended below a giant ball of gas. Acacia trees have too many thorns and then there's that whole you might meet a leopard up there. Balloon is safer.

Once the thing is inflated and you've been tipped into place or have climbed aboard, you are ready to take off just about as soon as it gets light and before the wind dies down. And yes, we are wind dependent for propulsion. Our captain, Barnabas, claimed he could spin the balloon round in mid-air to get the different sides of the basket views of whatever we would see that was amazing but we had no jet thrusters or anything like that. We'd have to go where the wind took us.

The plan (and I assume these people that run this gig know that the plan will always work) was for the wind to take us from our spot near our camp out over and into the Reserve so we could get a quality look at the landscape and maybe an animal or two or a hundred. We'd land after about an hour (which seems like a really short time) and be picked up wherever we happened to touch down. Seriously? Yep. We were trailed loosely speaking by a truck (for the balloon) and a bus (for us occupants of the balloon's basket). Of course, the balloon flies where the wind lets it go; the truck and bus have to stick to the roads. Hopefully they can keep up.

The view from the balloon. I like this one because of the heron flying above the water.

I think what I expected from this ride was that we would get some amazing looks at enormous herds of prey animals grazing and moving over the Earth. I found out pretty quickly there were two problems with this expectation. First, it's not the Great Migration in Masai Mara yet. That event, when there are huge herds of zebra and wildebeest moving, occurs in July and August. Sure, we saw a group of maybe 100 or so African buffalo but most of the groups of animals were in the twos and threes or maybe 10 to 15 tops. And most were standing still.

Second, we didn't necessarily fly right over the animals. Remember we are a little bit at the mercy of the wind. We can't just hang a left or right and zoom down to get a close look at a group of impala or a lone bull elephant. We were able to descend and ascend and did this throughout the ride, getting us a closer and more inclusive look at what was below. But buzz a group of topi or giraffe? No sir! I think the best looks at the animals that I thought I would get are below, a group of three topi (I guess the balloon made one skittish and he took off faster than my camera could capture) and a partial look at a harem herd of impala. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the chance to see and capture these creatures from a different angle; I just didn't set expectations very well for myself on the animal front here.

Three topi directly below...

and a few female impala grazing in the breaking morning light.

What I did get out of seeing Masai Mara from above was just how vast the landscape is. It seemed to go on forever and ever. I know the park is pretty big at 580 square miles but it seemed like I couldn't see anything close to the end of it. There was grass everywhere just punctuated every so often by a single tree. Except where there was water.

Seeing the surface of the ground from above really emphasized for me how precious the few spots of water were. The only place where it occurred (and animals like hippos were singularly constrained to these spots) were these tiny (relatively speaking) gashes in the landscapes surrounded by life. There were more trees, thicker grass and hippos and birds packed into these tiny areas than any other place we could see. I'm not sure if some of these things form a river or a connected group of watering holes during the rainy season but seeing them just every so often really emphasized what a precious resource water would be in place like this. I'm not sure how I could appreciate these oases in quite the same way if I weren't flying above them.

The precious water in an open gash in the grassland.

Now...about that fear of heights. I have to say it was amazingly nonexistent. The wicker basket that I imagined was flimsy was surprisingly solid and the fact that it came up to mid-chest level made it seem like there was really no way we could fall out. I suppose there really was no way we could fall out unless we started climbing on top of the basket somehow and who's going to do that? We for sure were high above the ground below but the ride was so gentle and soft and the rise and fall was so slow that it was almost like we ourselves were floating on the air. I've never been so high above the ground and felt so secure. It was kind of weird. Everything about the ride was so smooth from the very moment we drifted gently off the land to right before the instant we touched down.

I wrote that last sentence deliberately. Everything until right before we landed was soft. The touching down, though, that was kind of tough. Our departure up, up and away felt like we were being transported away on some pillowy cloud. I expected the touchdown might be equally comfortable. And I have no idea why.

Imagine you are being carried by the wind rapidly and just above the surface of the earth in what (again) is a surprisingly solid and rough basket and you are going to crash. That's us right before we touched down. We are sitting down on the (thankfully padded) benches in our craft and holding on to the straps on the opposite wall for dear life. We can't see anything other than the weaving of the basket about 24 inches from our face because sitting down (as shown in the second picture of this post) our heads are below the top of the basket.

To understand when we might hit (and it seems at this point we are moving very fast) we have to listen to the instruction of our captain, Barnabas, who does a remarkable job of informing us, thankfully. When we finally hit / crashed into the very firm Earth, it wasn't that bad and I expressed as much. Barnabas let me know we weren't down yet. In other words we bounced. Then we bounced again. And maybe again a couple of other times, finally dragging to a halt and slowly at first, then pretty rapidly, we tipped over and slammed on our backs finally on solid ground.

The view to my right after our crash landing. Hoping there are no lions nearby.

So there we were on our backs looking up at the tallest of the grasses around us in the Masai Mara National Reserve. The bus to get us out of there was, of course, nowhere to be seen because it wasn't flying and hadn't managed to make the kind of time the balloon made. So we were left for 20 minutes or so standing on some of the most gorgeous landscape on the face of the Earth in the same Reserve with lions, cheetah, hyena, leopards and African buffalo. How cool is that?

On our last trip to Africa, we'd never intentionally left our vehicle (be it a boat or car) when inside a park. True, we had to get out and push our truck once when it wouldn't start (not kidding!) but given our druthers we wouldn't have broken down in the first place. Now we were standing where the previous night or week or month elephants might have trodden or lions might have dragged down a kill or a family of mongoose may have passed by. It was so incredibly peaceful. But I was ultimately glad the bus was on its way. As romantic as the idea of being alone (well with 12 or so others) in the middle of the African landscape was, I'm glad we had a rescue vehicle coming. We kept an eye on some African buffalo that were comically far away. We kept an eye out anyway.

I'm not sure when (or even if) I'm taking my next balloon ride. If I only do it once in my life, I can't think of a cooler place to do it. It might not have met all of my inflated expectations but it did what it was supposed to do: get me a different way of looking at where I was. That one hour floating above the ground for sure got me an increased appreciation of a place I knew I already loved.

I'm also glad we didn't land in the middle of a pride of hungry lions. That never happens, right?

Spotted from the basket. Good thing she wasn't around when we landed

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.