There’s no more beautiful place now than Kenya’s Maasai Mara. Sweeping landscapes of dramatic hills and jagged mountains; valleys lush with acacia, fig and muratina forests and so many clear-running streams and rivers – it’s impossible to beat.
So guess what we saw this morning?
A good safari is an adventure, and an adventure takes effort. I keep thinking of the phrase, “No Pain – No Gain.” Sure, we can end the day at an unbelievably luxurious place with bubble bath and champagne. But just take a look at a successful safari traveler stepping out of her vehicle at the end of the day:
You won’t see the Belle of the Ball.
People come on safari to see lions and elephants, but they return for another trip and refer their friends often because of the surprisingly moving non-game viewing experiences.
Just as there’s more to America than Disneyland and Vegas, there’s a whole lot more to the places where the great animals still roam the wild.
As usual for this time of year it was bone dry. Mornings were still and cold. Saturn twinkled above in the ink blue predawn sky almost as brightly as the half moon which had set in the middle of the night. The sun rose as a giant orange ball behind a charcoal grey curtain of dust and the first breezes tossled the fields of dead, blonde grass. By noon dust devils twisted across the veld. By afternoon strong winds obliterated the cloudless sky with layers of dust.
Pundits like to advise potential safari travelers that this is the best time to see cats. To a certain extent that’s true. But what they see isn’t often what they expect:
Riding cabs in Nairobi isn’t fun. Traffic is unbelievable. You really get to know your cabbie.
Mine said he worked right through the last two elections. I didn’t believe him. I’d spoken to other cabbies, hotel workers, airport staffers – none plan on going to work August 8, the next election. He caught my wry smile in his rear view mirror and shouted, “I will!” then told me why.
Kenya’s August 8 national election will test democracy as never before, anywhere in the world. Kenya’s incredible tribalism and its new found intellectualism are being force-blended into a modern world that just so happens at this very moment in human history to be questioning the very worth of democracy.
I think it will make it. Others aren’t so sure.
I’m in Paris on my way back to Africa, stay tuned! It’s a fabulous Kenya/Tanzania safari that ends in the great Maasai Mara where we hope to encounter the great wildebeest migration.
I’ll be guiding a private family of four with two kids, and I love kids on safari!
Here’s where we’re going:
● Serengeti at two different places, Seronera and Ndutu
● Ngorongoro Crater
● Tarangire
● Zanzibar
● Maasai Mara
I’ll post as often as I can!
Chris Froome has come a long way. So has tourism.
Chris Froome is the son of the man, Clive Froome, who ran Kenya’s largest inbound tour company in the 1980s, and EWT was Clive’s largest client. I met Chris when he was 2 years old. That was not a happy time for him.
When Kathleen and I first went to Africa in the early 1970s we were warned about mosquito-born diseases like malaria, but there were few other dreaded diseases. AIDS wasn’t yet known. Cholera seemed to be confined to the slums of Asia and South America.
Cholera has broken out in Nairobi. The first 30 or so cases were not found where you would expect to find a hard-to-transmit but deadly disease: in the slums. More than 400 cases have been confirmed and many in two of the most upscale areas of the city, Karen and Westlands. What’s going on?
For the first time in a number of years, the great wildebeest migration seems to be “on track.” This means when I return to Africa in a few weeks that I should be able to show my clients a dramatic river crossing in The Mara.
This year the weather was fairly “normal” as defined by the mean of the last twenty years. Parts of Tanzania suffered a mini-drought, and the lands of the wilde were a bit dryer than “normal” but all within the margin of “normal.” But does “normal” mean anything, any more?
Politics are changing lightning fast and climate is changing lightning fast, and now it seems that wild animal behavior is also seriously changing.
I’ve written about the catastrophic decline of lions, but recently we learned of one of the weirdest wild animal behaviors ever: inter-species nursing! Combined with several years ago, when a lionness adopted an oryx (!) in Samburu, I think we’re seeing nature desperately trying to evolve as fast as earth’s temperatures warm.
South Africans delightedly use Trump as a global explanation for their own Jacob Zuma, but if we get distracted by colorful individuals at the helm of complex political systems imploding all around us, we’ll have created nothing to fill the vacuum that follows their recklessness.
Wasting time trying to pin sophisticated crimes on the “orange doofus” (as South Africans describe Trump) will fatally delay fixing the system.
After elephants “terrified” a Kenyan politician campaigning near Tsavo National Park, the candidate told supporters the government has done “Very little… to make sure human-wildlife conflict is addressed.”
A few weeks earlier Kenya’s proud new SGR train plowed into a cow in the same area because elephants had torn down the fence along the rail line.
In the last few months I’ve seen first-hand the increasing human/wildlife conflict. It’s not a pretty scene.
Last night Trump took a “fun trip” to a “ a dystopian land of terror… a city so, so, so out of control, so dangerous.” “France is no longer France,” Trump recently pronounced.
It’s hard to believe that someone who confuses WWI with WWII and can’t even name the advisories of either one is joining the centennial celebrations of WWI. What’s behind this meeting?
The neo-cons controlling Trump. Africa is the reason for this meeting. Let me explain.
Trump is expected to lift sanctions on The Sudan today, in place for 20 years and indeed a complex policy with a checkered history. Trump’s move is bereft of any ideology intended simply to get government out of business. There’s oil there, you know.
Whether this ideology-free policy, business first, policy will have any value except to increase the bottom line of ExxonMobil is unlikely. Appropriately, the lifting will be announced by Tillerson, ExxonMobil’s former CEO.