Immediately upon arriving in Nairobi I had to re-pack by bag into a smaller day pack for a three day trip to the Masai Mara National Park. The "Mara" is the quintessential image of Africa for many people and it is the northern extension of Tanzania's Serengeti Park. As the saying goes, Kenya is Africa in microcosm. The Masai Mara Park supports millions of animals including wildebeest, zebra, impala, eland, reedbuck, waterbuck, black rhino, hippo, crocodile, elephant, Masai giraffe, cheetah, leopard, spotted hyena, black-backed jackal, and lions as well as numerous birds. The Masai Mara is 1510 square kilometers of open rolling grasslands bordered by the Mara River. This African Savannah
For this leg of the trip we stayed in permanent tents and had meals served in a central tent. At night we sat around the campfire and got to know everyone in the group.
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| Me in front of my tent. |
As I said in my post from the road, on our first day we did a 2 1/2 hour game drive and saw the BIG FIVE! We were so lucky!
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| Black Rhino |
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| Elephant |
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| Lion |
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| Leopard (actually from the next day but I didn't get a good picture of the first one) |
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Buffalo (also from the next morning but a better picture)
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Also during our trip we were able to pay to visit a Maasai Village and meet the warriors. The Maasai are an easily recognizable tribe of nomads who wear bright red shukas (blankets) and live in familial villages and raise livestock. They performed a dance called the adumu in which the men leap high. We were also shown around a home and shown how to start a fire with no kindling or lighter. They still practice many controversial actions such as male and female circumcision (at ages 18 and 14 respectively) and live on a diet of kule naa-ilanga, a mixture of blood drained from a cow's neck (jugular) and milk. The girls are married off at a very early age and the groom or his family will "purchase" his wife with cows, sheep or goats. One man may have several wives. In the village we visited, the father had eight wives with each family having their own home.
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| Maasai Warriors performing Adumu |
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| House made of sticks and cow dung |
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| Starting a fire |
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