Safari - Shush, Mr. Hippo, I'm Trying to Sleep

One staple of the African experience is “going on Safari.” We saw all of this in the two days we spent at the Marsai Mara Game Park in Kenya, which borders the Serengetti in Tanzania (about 5 hour drive out of Nairobi). Technically we went to both Kenya and Tanzania on this trip. You can see me on the marker, with one foot in Kenya and one foot in Tanzania (standing in two places at the same time.) Before images of binoculars, khaki’s, and round, Safari hats fill your mind. Let me tell you that the modern Safari experience is both quite commercialized and expensive. Nevertheless, true to the advertisement, we saw plenty of Elephants, Giraffes, Zebras, and even Lions. I guess it is extremely rare, but we saw a total of six Cheetah’s and over 13 Lions resting in the shade under some bushes, with their baby cubs playing by them. And every time, we saw the warthog running across the plain, I couldn’t get the character Pumbaa from Lion King out of my head! You drive around in a van with a roof that lifts off. So you can stand as you 4x4 over dirt roads and through the brush, scouring for any hint of movement. However, the fact is that without a good guide, (ours had been touring Kenya parks for 30 years), we probably would have missed most of the animals in the 200 square miles that make up the Masai Mara. You honestly could drive through the wide expanse of Africa without seeing anything but a good panoramic view of scenery. Furthermore, I feel like my little pocket digital camera with 3x zoom, doesn’t do any justice to how close to the animals we were. My recommendation to anyone who goes on Safari is to make sure to have a good camera lens with you! A little better camera and I could’ve counted the whiskers on the “cats” nose. The hotel we stayed at was in the Game Park and had its on own Hippopotamus Sanctuary. It was pretty cool to be able to have a Coca-cola, while watching baby Hippos fight from the 360 degree observatory that was built out into the middle of the pond. That was, of course, until the whiff of Hippo reached your nose. For animals that live in a perpetual bath, that was one nasty smell. When that wind heads your direction, you decide pretty quickly to remove yourself! And furthermore, since our room was so close to the Hippo Pond, we were constantly awakening to sounds of “yawning” Hippo’s. “Shshhhh, Mr. Hippo, I’m trying to sleep!”Since we had two 5:30am days on this Safari, New Year’s Eve wasn’t much of a party at the Safari Lodge. But, we did stay up to midnight to ring in 2008 with a lame DJ, a drop of 20 balloons, and plenty of Japanese tourists and Senior Citizens. On our way back to Nairobi, we stopped and toured a Masai Village. These are the “Native Indians” of East Africa. They are a tribal people that live in mud huts, care for livestock, and make fire from rubbing sticks together. Furthermore, the rite of passage for males into manhood is killing a lion. Although the Tanzanian and Kenyan governments have instituted programs to encourage the Maasai to abandon their traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle, the people have clung to their age-old customs, like piercing and stretching of their earlobes the removal of the canine tooth buds, bright color dress, and a diet consisting of meat, milk and blood of their cattle. And, because of their distinctive customs, they have become one of the most well-known African ethnic groups internationally. But, they also have learned how to make money off the ever steady flow of tourists that travel by their huts.