Habari za safari? (also this is the longest post ever, sorry :) )
Means: What is the news of the journey?
Answer: Safi Sana!!! = Very excellent!!!
There aren’t really words that explain the greatness of this weekend, but I’m going to try. The KEI group went to Maasai Mara National Reserve for a couple of days of safari fun. The drive down there was around 6 hours, mostly due to the sad state of the roads: swerve around the giant pothole(s)! Pass the slow truck! Dodge the cows! Take it off road! In fact, it was like one big off-roading trip, but with mud, so we got to slip and slide around in the mud due to rain at the time. So much fun! There were two vans for our group, and a man named Elijah drove the one I was in. He was so much fun and such a skillful driver that we were sure he must be magical. He could take this little van through/over/around anything! When the other van got stuck, we didn’t bother hooking up to pull it out. Instead, we just pushed it out by the nose head-on. These vans had pop-up roofs for when you were in the park so you could stand up and shoot photos from the roof. It also meant that you could stand up during the bumpy ride and end up with an experience even more fun than that of a roller coaster. We would get thrown against the side, against each other, toward the front, toward the back, wherever. You could get all sorts of fun bruises and not even care - you’re just looking forward to the next giant waterhole you have to ford. No dead oxen on this trek, baby (for those who know and love “Oregon Trail.”)
On the drive to the park we passed right through the Great Rift Valley, complete with scenic overlooks, so I got some terribly inadequate photos of the area. It’s a beautiful valley full of hills, volcanoes of various sizes, trees, and shadows. This we had to drive through to get into Maasailand. As we trekked farther and farther from Nairobi, the more the towns changed. No more big city Nairobi. Instead, there were a few smaller Maasai-based towns like Narok, and mostly there were villages full of grazing land for the copious amounts of Maasai livestock and dotted with the little red specks that are Maasai men meandering about the hills. Apparently they wear red for three reasons:
1 - Lions supposedly fear red
2 - To identify comrades in battle
3 - To find lost herders
I suppose I should go ahead and explain about this group of people, the Maasai, that heavily influence the culture throughout all of Kenya:
Everywhere I’ve been here, people are selling “Maasai” goods. The Maasai are tribal people who have chosen to continue to live according to the traditions and customs of their culture rather than modernizing along with the rest of the country. Of course this makes them fodder for the tourists (like us) as well as an interesting issue for the Kenyan government. On Sunday morning, before heading back to Nairobi, we were actually picked from our campsite and walked to a real Maasai village (oh boy was it muddy, it had rained all night, and I was in heaven!). The Maasai live off of the animals that they herd and care for; mostly cows, goats, sheep, and chicken. They eat no fruits or vegetables, and instead eat only meat from their animals while drinking a milk and blood mixture, twice a day. This is interesting because they choose to continue this practice amongst growing outbreaks of Rift Valley Fever, believed to be transmitted through meat, especially cattle. The Maasai men (and boys) walk all day with their huge herds and return to the village with them in the evening. One boy we met on the side of the road told us that he had around 200 cattle, but that the number kept growing so he wasn’t exactly sure how many there were in reality. The Maasai villages all help each other with funds (gained mainly from tourists like us who pay to visit their villages and who buy their goods) to send their children to school. They must pay school fees and pay for uniforms and books, but they do find it important to make sure the children receive an education. They live in tiny huts made from sticks, grass, mud, and cow dung. The women build and repair the houses (you will often see them on top of roofs spreading the cow dung/mud mixture or wiping it on the sides of the huts, with bare hands even!), cook, clean, care for the children; make some of the curios (goods to sell to tourists), and carry goods to the entrance of the reserve to thrust into safari vans waiting to enter in hopes of wearing their inhabitants down enough to buy them. It’s interesting how much the tourism industry has affected these people who are half living according to custom and tradition and half asking for handouts or business from tourists who can be easily conned into paying outrageous prices for simple goods and services. At the village, the men were the ones who spoke to us and seemed the most energetic and happy by our presence. They danced traditional dances for us (in the mud and all), got us to join in, helped take pictures, and explained a great deal about their culture. They showed us how they make fire old-school style (yep, the rubbing a wooden stick way), and they showed us inside the chief’s hut (really warm in there - they cook inside - makes for a bit of a stuffy home, though). Another interesting aspect of Maasai culture is that they are polygamous. Women are sold into arranged marriages among neighboring villages for 10 cows, 10 goats, and 10 sheep, and Elijah told us, “When you marry a Maasai, you marry the whole village.” This means that the men not only have multiple wives, but they can also sleep with anyone else’s wife. Both women and men are required to be circumcised. For men, this occurs before he can become a man, and for a woman before she can be married. Female circumcision, aka a “clitorectomy,” is what is known in the US as “genital mutilation,” with problems often arising from the use of unsanitary knives and such.
One of the most difficult issues for me regarding the Maasai is their treatment of women. The women didn’t even speak to us and simply didn’t seem as happy as the men, but who’s to say that’s not simply because they don’t much care for white women or because they had other things to do than entertain us. Still, the feminist in me screams “injustice!” while at the same time there is undeniably a lot to be said for respecting other cultures, especially those that I don’t fully understand. I wish that I could have spoken with some of those women, just to see how they felt about their role in the world. I have such a problem with the whole idea of humans viewed as property and treated as such, but I also realize that this is a western opinion that is not necessarily shared by all. Perhaps the women there wouldn’t desire any other life. Perhaps they are proud to do their duty to their people. Perhaps they feel trapped and mistreated. How do we know? It was a wonderful time, though, and I really enjoyed seeing how these people live in real life. What a different world!
Now, the safari!!! Friday we arrived at our campsite, “Mara Springs Campsite.” I’m not really sure that you can count it as camping since we had huge tents (I was in a 3-person with Bailey and Kathleen) complete with beds (not on the ground), mattresses, sheets, blankets, pillows, etc. It also had electricity for a while at night, and a toilet, shower, and sink in the back - complete with hot water! They also prepared all our food for us, and it was definitely some delicious food. They even packed us sack lunches on the second day when we were out on a game drive for the entire day. Monkeys hung around the site, waiting to be fed I’m sure, and Maasai would come around to chat and find groups to take to their villages. In fact, on Saturday night, they made us a campfire and Shappel had brought supplies to make s’mores. Now the Maasai, whose diet consists of meat, milk, and blood, had never had a marshmallow before, much less a s’more, so we taught them how to make them. One said it was too sweet and didn’t like them, but the others really liked them and even had more than one! It was so fun to talk with them and watch them make a s’more for the first time. One’s name was Solomon, and he was the most talkative. He’s in the warrior stage (age 13-20, approximately) at 18 years old. He doesn’t have the huge holes in his ears or pieces of his earlobe cut off yet, though, like many of the Maasai. Some of the old men have holes so big that their earlobes dangle down past their shoulders! Anyway, the campsite was a really fun place to stay for sure. On safari we saw tons of game, got tossed around in the vans, and had an overall fantastic time. Even when you would go an hour or two without seeing an animal, the views made it worth staying out there. This past weekend we had a bit of a rainy spell, so in the evenings we got a bit of rain, which made for incredible cloud formations, and on Saturday we even saw lightning bolts streaking down in the distance across the savannah. You aren’t really allowed to get out during the safari (for obvious reasons), but there were a couple of areas where we could stretch our legs. One was the hippo pools on the Mara River, where the hippos all hang out, and you can see them sometimes out on land, but mostly sticking their noses up out of the water. The other was the border between the Maasai Mara Reserve in Kenya and the Serengeti National Reserve in Tanzania. There was a stone marker with a line through it marking the border, so we got to cross into Tanzania without a visa! Ha!
Alright, I’m going to try and list the animals we saw with any info I can remember about them…Elijah knew a lot!
-Weaver Birds: At the entrance to the reserve there were trees full of amazing nests and loud, yellow birds. Apparently the males build the nests to attract the females, and the females go check them out and will dismantle the nests if they aren’t to their liking!
-Grant’s Gazelle and Thomson’s Gazelle: Cute little gazelles that were everywhere and generally hang out in large herds and amongst herds of topis as well. Apparently they are fast, so lions don’t go after them very often
-Topis: One of my favorites - Animals with beautiful coloring and interesting builds. I really loved seeing them, and there were plenty! Once we even saw three of them watching lions stalk some other prey. Crazy!
-Hippos: You know, fat, funny, enjoy water. We even saw a baby!
-Elephants: Wow! We got so close, and they are such beautiful animals. They are very family-oriented, and apparently will bury and mourn their dead, remembering their locations forever after a death. This means no elephant graveyards like in the Lion King! Also, they avoid inbreeding by kicking the males out of the herd when they are old enough to go find a different herd and different family, but will greet one another if they meet again, just like human families. We saw baby elephants as well!
-Giraffes - Maasai giraffes. They like eating the Acacia trees, which have big spikes covering their branches. It sounds painful to me, but apparently they have special sticky tongues and I guess some special spike-avoidance skills?
-Zebras - we saw a herd on the drive to Maasai Mara, just on the side of the road - so cool!
-Ostriches - The males are black and the females gray. This way the males can sit on the eggs at night and blend into the dark, and the females sit during the day where they blend into the brush. We saw huge herds of these, often intermixed with gazelles and topis.
-Wildebeests - Just as crazy looking as in the Lion King. Too bad the migration isn’t until later in the year. There is an enormous wildebeest migration from Serengeti to Maasai Mara every year. Cool!
-Water bucks - In the water, no less!
-Ugly birds - yes, the Maasai telling us about them called them “ugly birds,” which they are. They look like old men; it’s hilarious!
-Crowned cranes - funny hair, and apparently they are also called “Ugandan Birds” because the coloring on their wings resembles the Ugandan flag.
-Hawk (I think) - It was actually in the process of eating a kill when we happened upon it
-dik-dik - tiny little deer-like creatures - very cute
-Jackal - like a fox/dog mix. I like it a lot!
-Warthogs - yep, we saw a ton of them, just like Pumba! They trot around with their tails up in the air and their funny back hair. In fact, we even saw some baby warthogs. Elijah says they’re pretty dumb and have about 10-minute memories, but I liked them anyway! They also hung out with the gazelles and topis.
-Mongoose! - Ran into their holes, but we saw them gosh darnit!
-African buffalo - huge herds, still cool-looking! They’re aggressive if you provoke them.
-Hartebeest - crazy looking animal, similar to the topi.
-Hyena! - it was running a little ways away from us. I have no idea why it was running, but hyenas have the strangest gait I’ve ever seen.
-LIONS!!!! - both days in fact, we saw prides of lions - males, females, and babies. The males are apparently the lazy ones who do nothing but sleep all the time. The females hunt and bring the food first to the males, then to the cubs, and then they eat. Lions were just hanging around as safari vans scurried about, trying to get good photo vantage points. They are so majestic and beautiful, but of course you wouldn’t want to meet one on the ground. The second day we actually watched them start to stalk a couple of topis. It was so organized and sneaky! I think they were foiled by the vans, though, but man, those lions were the most amazing things I’ve seen. They were so close!!! The Maasai are supposed to have to kill a lion and bring back its head to graduate from warrior status, but the government is stopping that for the most part these days, so now I think they just go for teeth and claws. How? I have no idea.
This list doesn’t even mention the beautiful birds and butterflies that were speckled throughout the reserve. If you made it through this whole post, good job! It’s a long one I know, but I could talk about this trip forever!
Photos coming soon, so keep an eye out!
Answer: Safi Sana!!! = Very excellent!!!
There aren’t really words that explain the greatness of this weekend, but I’m going to try. The KEI group went to Maasai Mara National Reserve for a couple of days of safari fun. The drive down there was around 6 hours, mostly due to the sad state of the roads: swerve around the giant pothole(s)! Pass the slow truck! Dodge the cows! Take it off road! In fact, it was like one big off-roading trip, but with mud, so we got to slip and slide around in the mud due to rain at the time. So much fun! There were two vans for our group, and a man named Elijah drove the one I was in. He was so much fun and such a skillful driver that we were sure he must be magical. He could take this little van through/over/around anything! When the other van got stuck, we didn’t bother hooking up to pull it out. Instead, we just pushed it out by the nose head-on. These vans had pop-up roofs for when you were in the park so you could stand up and shoot photos from the roof. It also meant that you could stand up during the bumpy ride and end up with an experience even more fun than that of a roller coaster. We would get thrown against the side, against each other, toward the front, toward the back, wherever. You could get all sorts of fun bruises and not even care - you’re just looking forward to the next giant waterhole you have to ford. No dead oxen on this trek, baby (for those who know and love “Oregon Trail.”)
On the drive to the park we passed right through the Great Rift Valley, complete with scenic overlooks, so I got some terribly inadequate photos of the area. It’s a beautiful valley full of hills, volcanoes of various sizes, trees, and shadows. This we had to drive through to get into Maasailand. As we trekked farther and farther from Nairobi, the more the towns changed. No more big city Nairobi. Instead, there were a few smaller Maasai-based towns like Narok, and mostly there were villages full of grazing land for the copious amounts of Maasai livestock and dotted with the little red specks that are Maasai men meandering about the hills. Apparently they wear red for three reasons:
1 - Lions supposedly fear red
2 - To identify comrades in battle
3 - To find lost herders
I suppose I should go ahead and explain about this group of people, the Maasai, that heavily influence the culture throughout all of Kenya:
Everywhere I’ve been here, people are selling “Maasai” goods. The Maasai are tribal people who have chosen to continue to live according to the traditions and customs of their culture rather than modernizing along with the rest of the country. Of course this makes them fodder for the tourists (like us) as well as an interesting issue for the Kenyan government. On Sunday morning, before heading back to Nairobi, we were actually picked from our campsite and walked to a real Maasai village (oh boy was it muddy, it had rained all night, and I was in heaven!). The Maasai live off of the animals that they herd and care for; mostly cows, goats, sheep, and chicken. They eat no fruits or vegetables, and instead eat only meat from their animals while drinking a milk and blood mixture, twice a day. This is interesting because they choose to continue this practice amongst growing outbreaks of Rift Valley Fever, believed to be transmitted through meat, especially cattle. The Maasai men (and boys) walk all day with their huge herds and return to the village with them in the evening. One boy we met on the side of the road told us that he had around 200 cattle, but that the number kept growing so he wasn’t exactly sure how many there were in reality. The Maasai villages all help each other with funds (gained mainly from tourists like us who pay to visit their villages and who buy their goods) to send their children to school. They must pay school fees and pay for uniforms and books, but they do find it important to make sure the children receive an education. They live in tiny huts made from sticks, grass, mud, and cow dung. The women build and repair the houses (you will often see them on top of roofs spreading the cow dung/mud mixture or wiping it on the sides of the huts, with bare hands even!), cook, clean, care for the children; make some of the curios (goods to sell to tourists), and carry goods to the entrance of the reserve to thrust into safari vans waiting to enter in hopes of wearing their inhabitants down enough to buy them. It’s interesting how much the tourism industry has affected these people who are half living according to custom and tradition and half asking for handouts or business from tourists who can be easily conned into paying outrageous prices for simple goods and services. At the village, the men were the ones who spoke to us and seemed the most energetic and happy by our presence. They danced traditional dances for us (in the mud and all), got us to join in, helped take pictures, and explained a great deal about their culture. They showed us how they make fire old-school style (yep, the rubbing a wooden stick way), and they showed us inside the chief’s hut (really warm in there - they cook inside - makes for a bit of a stuffy home, though). Another interesting aspect of Maasai culture is that they are polygamous. Women are sold into arranged marriages among neighboring villages for 10 cows, 10 goats, and 10 sheep, and Elijah told us, “When you marry a Maasai, you marry the whole village.” This means that the men not only have multiple wives, but they can also sleep with anyone else’s wife. Both women and men are required to be circumcised. For men, this occurs before he can become a man, and for a woman before she can be married. Female circumcision, aka a “clitorectomy,” is what is known in the US as “genital mutilation,” with problems often arising from the use of unsanitary knives and such.
One of the most difficult issues for me regarding the Maasai is their treatment of women. The women didn’t even speak to us and simply didn’t seem as happy as the men, but who’s to say that’s not simply because they don’t much care for white women or because they had other things to do than entertain us. Still, the feminist in me screams “injustice!” while at the same time there is undeniably a lot to be said for respecting other cultures, especially those that I don’t fully understand. I wish that I could have spoken with some of those women, just to see how they felt about their role in the world. I have such a problem with the whole idea of humans viewed as property and treated as such, but I also realize that this is a western opinion that is not necessarily shared by all. Perhaps the women there wouldn’t desire any other life. Perhaps they are proud to do their duty to their people. Perhaps they feel trapped and mistreated. How do we know? It was a wonderful time, though, and I really enjoyed seeing how these people live in real life. What a different world!
Now, the safari!!! Friday we arrived at our campsite, “Mara Springs Campsite.” I’m not really sure that you can count it as camping since we had huge tents (I was in a 3-person with Bailey and Kathleen) complete with beds (not on the ground), mattresses, sheets, blankets, pillows, etc. It also had electricity for a while at night, and a toilet, shower, and sink in the back - complete with hot water! They also prepared all our food for us, and it was definitely some delicious food. They even packed us sack lunches on the second day when we were out on a game drive for the entire day. Monkeys hung around the site, waiting to be fed I’m sure, and Maasai would come around to chat and find groups to take to their villages. In fact, on Saturday night, they made us a campfire and Shappel had brought supplies to make s’mores. Now the Maasai, whose diet consists of meat, milk, and blood, had never had a marshmallow before, much less a s’more, so we taught them how to make them. One said it was too sweet and didn’t like them, but the others really liked them and even had more than one! It was so fun to talk with them and watch them make a s’more for the first time. One’s name was Solomon, and he was the most talkative. He’s in the warrior stage (age 13-20, approximately) at 18 years old. He doesn’t have the huge holes in his ears or pieces of his earlobe cut off yet, though, like many of the Maasai. Some of the old men have holes so big that their earlobes dangle down past their shoulders! Anyway, the campsite was a really fun place to stay for sure. On safari we saw tons of game, got tossed around in the vans, and had an overall fantastic time. Even when you would go an hour or two without seeing an animal, the views made it worth staying out there. This past weekend we had a bit of a rainy spell, so in the evenings we got a bit of rain, which made for incredible cloud formations, and on Saturday we even saw lightning bolts streaking down in the distance across the savannah. You aren’t really allowed to get out during the safari (for obvious reasons), but there were a couple of areas where we could stretch our legs. One was the hippo pools on the Mara River, where the hippos all hang out, and you can see them sometimes out on land, but mostly sticking their noses up out of the water. The other was the border between the Maasai Mara Reserve in Kenya and the Serengeti National Reserve in Tanzania. There was a stone marker with a line through it marking the border, so we got to cross into Tanzania without a visa! Ha!
Alright, I’m going to try and list the animals we saw with any info I can remember about them…Elijah knew a lot!
-Weaver Birds: At the entrance to the reserve there were trees full of amazing nests and loud, yellow birds. Apparently the males build the nests to attract the females, and the females go check them out and will dismantle the nests if they aren’t to their liking!
-Grant’s Gazelle and Thomson’s Gazelle: Cute little gazelles that were everywhere and generally hang out in large herds and amongst herds of topis as well. Apparently they are fast, so lions don’t go after them very often
-Topis: One of my favorites - Animals with beautiful coloring and interesting builds. I really loved seeing them, and there were plenty! Once we even saw three of them watching lions stalk some other prey. Crazy!
-Hippos: You know, fat, funny, enjoy water. We even saw a baby!
-Elephants: Wow! We got so close, and they are such beautiful animals. They are very family-oriented, and apparently will bury and mourn their dead, remembering their locations forever after a death. This means no elephant graveyards like in the Lion King! Also, they avoid inbreeding by kicking the males out of the herd when they are old enough to go find a different herd and different family, but will greet one another if they meet again, just like human families. We saw baby elephants as well!
-Giraffes - Maasai giraffes. They like eating the Acacia trees, which have big spikes covering their branches. It sounds painful to me, but apparently they have special sticky tongues and I guess some special spike-avoidance skills?
-Zebras - we saw a herd on the drive to Maasai Mara, just on the side of the road - so cool!
-Ostriches - The males are black and the females gray. This way the males can sit on the eggs at night and blend into the dark, and the females sit during the day where they blend into the brush. We saw huge herds of these, often intermixed with gazelles and topis.
-Wildebeests - Just as crazy looking as in the Lion King. Too bad the migration isn’t until later in the year. There is an enormous wildebeest migration from Serengeti to Maasai Mara every year. Cool!
-Water bucks - In the water, no less!
-Ugly birds - yes, the Maasai telling us about them called them “ugly birds,” which they are. They look like old men; it’s hilarious!
-Crowned cranes - funny hair, and apparently they are also called “Ugandan Birds” because the coloring on their wings resembles the Ugandan flag.
-Hawk (I think) - It was actually in the process of eating a kill when we happened upon it
-dik-dik - tiny little deer-like creatures - very cute
-Jackal - like a fox/dog mix. I like it a lot!
-Warthogs - yep, we saw a ton of them, just like Pumba! They trot around with their tails up in the air and their funny back hair. In fact, we even saw some baby warthogs. Elijah says they’re pretty dumb and have about 10-minute memories, but I liked them anyway! They also hung out with the gazelles and topis.
-Mongoose! - Ran into their holes, but we saw them gosh darnit!
-African buffalo - huge herds, still cool-looking! They’re aggressive if you provoke them.
-Hartebeest - crazy looking animal, similar to the topi.
-Hyena! - it was running a little ways away from us. I have no idea why it was running, but hyenas have the strangest gait I’ve ever seen.
-LIONS!!!! - both days in fact, we saw prides of lions - males, females, and babies. The males are apparently the lazy ones who do nothing but sleep all the time. The females hunt and bring the food first to the males, then to the cubs, and then they eat. Lions were just hanging around as safari vans scurried about, trying to get good photo vantage points. They are so majestic and beautiful, but of course you wouldn’t want to meet one on the ground. The second day we actually watched them start to stalk a couple of topis. It was so organized and sneaky! I think they were foiled by the vans, though, but man, those lions were the most amazing things I’ve seen. They were so close!!! The Maasai are supposed to have to kill a lion and bring back its head to graduate from warrior status, but the government is stopping that for the most part these days, so now I think they just go for teeth and claws. How? I have no idea.
This list doesn’t even mention the beautiful birds and butterflies that were speckled throughout the reserve. If you made it through this whole post, good job! It’s a long one I know, but I could talk about this trip forever!
Photos coming soon, so keep an eye out!