This will be the first of a few updates about our recent adventures in east Africa, and this one will focus on Kenya and our time in the Masai Mara. We Are still loving this continent and all it has to offer. It is once again wholly different from anywhere else we've experienced, and it has exceeded all expectations. We have been very lucky to have been able to throw all these awesome adventures together in such short notice, and we could not be happier with our choices thus far. We've already had amazing times and met great people in Uganda and Rwanda, and we did the same by joining another group for our Kenya and Tanzania adventures.
We were able to get a decent flight from Rwanda's Kigali airport back to Nairobi in plenty of time for us to make the pre-departure meeting for our Acacia Adventures group tour of Kenya and Tanzania. As it happened, we were just joining this tour for a short leg of their much bigger Cairo to Cape town epic. We had had the good fortune to have met a few of the longer-term travellers when they and the Acacia truck stopped at the Red Chili Hideaway in Kampala, Uganda where we were also staying. So we had the opportunity to get a sneak peek at the bus and some of the people. The pre-departure meeting we had in Kenya gave us a chance to meet the rest of our group. There is a great mix of people and we've been very lucky we all get along vey well. We have made some great friends and are so pleased we chose to do the group travel thing while here in Africa, as we were very close to doing a private custom tour from another company, Savuka, with the idea of cramming everything in that we wanted to see, so again we feel fortunate to have found all these little trips and groups that worked with our dates. Now that we are on this Acacia trip, we really wish we had the time to stay longer on the truck and go all the way down to South Africa, but our time is getting constantly shorter and we still have some big ambitions outside of Africa. So, we have a few more adventures with this group before meeting our next one in Jordan.
Our tour with Acacia is a two week journey featuring Safaris in the Masai Mara, Serengeti, and Ngorongoro Crater, as well as overland travel and camping in Kenya and Tanzania, concluding with three nights on the spice island of Zanzibar, where I will celebrate my 29th birthday. We have already seen so much, and also taken an enormous amount of photographs, so for practicality reasons we have chosen to split the writing duties and make a few blog entries of this tour, so as to ease the burden on ourselves and hopefully split things up a bit for our friends and families keeping tabs on us. This entry will detail our first few days and will cover our time in Kenya, with the highlight being the Masai Mara safari, so here we go.
As the Masai Mara was an 'optional extra' to the big tour, we were in matatus, chartered from Chronicle Tours instead of taking the big truck with our lockers and everything. Matatus’ are jeeps specifically designed for safaris. In matatus’ the roof can be raised so that the passengers inside can stand to getting better views and pictures of the wildlife. Parting from our big truck was a bit of a nuisance to anticipate things we may need and leave our big bags behind, but the matatu was definitely a better vehicle for the safaris. The biggest downside of not taking the big truck was that instead of carrying on directly to the Serengeti after the Mara, we had to go back to Nairobi before heading down to Tanzania. Anyhow, it was a great time and the extra driving just gave us a chance to get to know our travel companions. We drove from Nairobi via the Great Rift Valley and stayed in a permanent tented campsite called Enkolong right on the edge of the Mara, and only a short distance from a Masai village that we got to visit. We were out for two nights and got to see loads of wildlife, actually seeing all of the big 5 before finishing our first morning game drive. This I think is a story best told with pictures, so here are some photos to gawk at if you wish...
Our pee break at the Great Rift Valley viewpoint
Now for the wildlife……starting with the big 5, which we were lucky enough to see….
A leopard….
Elephants…
And the last of the big 5…the buffalo….
And what I will refer to as the E5 (estrogen 5) [Kim, Sara, Candy, Karen, Teresa]….this has been a female dominated trip
Your favourite globetrotters…..
And more wildlife now….
A cheetah waking from a nap…..
Pumba, the warthog made famous in the Lion King…
In this next panoramic photo, what looks like rocks on shore and in the water, is actually hippos…
Lunch break… keep your eyes peeled for lions… we don’t want to end up as lunch while having our lunch…
lioness…
A rare sighting… a female leopard on the hunt with her two cubs. When our jeeps showed up, they decided to head up tree to do some posing…
We were lucky enough to stumble upon three adult male lions chilling in the shade after a morning kill… Check out those teeth!
Content…
Front row seats!
More elephants!
Close up… look at those eye lashes!
Pumba with his little family of warthogs…
Mr. Croc…
Hungry, hungry hippos!
The giraffes were so incredible to watch…
An elephant family, complete with baby!
One of these things is not like the other…
A nice variety…
We visited a Masai village. This was the chiefs eldest son and next in line to become chief of the village….
The Masai guys doing their welcome dance…
A lions mane, which every young male must harvest on his own to become a warrior….
Kim meeting the chief of the village…
The guys showing us how they make fire…
Our guide showing us the traditional Masai hut…
Austin having his picture taken, after showing the guy which way round the camera goes…
An adorable little girl in the village…
A discussion about how many cows each of the girls would fetch for marriage...
Some of the Masai women….
A panorama of the village…
Another little girl Kim was fond of….
And that was it, our Masai Mara adventure.....a great success by all measures. We did have spots of rain which was unexpected, as we had read that this was the dry season, with no rains ‘til mid-March, but we seem to have caught the rainy season early, as we did in Australia. Apparently the 'short rains' of November-December were shorter than usual, so they were overdue. Anyway, it hasn't interfered with any of our activities and we haven't gotten nearly as wet as we did in Australia. We are actually now still on mainland Tanzania, but will hopefully be posting this from Zanzibar, along with our subsequent stories of our Tanzanian adventures.
All the best to anyone reading.
Until next time,
The Knotty Travellers
No comments:
Post a Comment