Jambo, Jambo

I’ve been in Kenya for nearly a week now and the majority of it has been all about game drives in the Mara. In that time I’ve learnt which animals make up the Big 5 – lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and buffalo – and I’ve seen all of them bar the rhino. I’ve also seen cheetahs, giraffes, wildebeest, topi, gazelles (Thompson and grand), hippos, crocs, zebras, the list goes on. It’s been absolutely phenomenal – I feel like I’m living IN the National Geographic Channel!

Some of the more interesting things we've seen have included:

• Lions feasting on a recent kill while vultures, a jackal and all of us tourists watched on from a safe distance;
• A baby giraffe that was so young it still had its umbilical cord attached;
• Baby elephants that were “small” enough to pass right under the belly of fully grown ones;
• A male lion facing off against a buffalo before thinking the better of it and backing down;
• The king of the jungles mating ritual (from start to finish in about 20 seconds!);
• Young elephants tussling with each other and looking like they were having fun in mud baths;
• A leopard chilling out on the bank of a river;
• Giant hippos randomly emerging from a once still river surface while crocs watched on;
• Baboons and zebras hanging out on a football pitch and looking like they’re about to play a game;
• Families of warthogs running one way before stopping, looking round and running back in the opposite direction

Like I said, it’s been phenomenal, and I still can’t get over how much I’ve already seen.

Outside of the Mara Reserve, we visited a Masai village where we were shown how the Masai warriors will start a fire without matches, and also discovered that the guy who jumps the highest pays less cows for his bride(s). They told Tim and Troy (who are both over 6ft tall) that they would make good Masai and that they must have drunk giraffe milk when they were young to get so tall! We were also taking into their houses which was an experience. Their homes are small and extremely dark (virtually no windows to keep out the rain) - there's a tiny kitchen with an open fire and just enough room to sit around it, a room where mum and dad sleep, another for ALL the kids... and the other half of the house is made up of a single room where they keep the baby cows and goats for security.

We made friends with Soloman, one of the local Masai who worked at our camp, guarding it from hyenas at night (you can hear the hyenas whooping after dark - it's enough of an incentive to convince you to hold on till morning if you happen to need the bathroom during the night!). He had a club throwing competition with some of our boys one evening and the camp, and would join us around the fire after dinner before going on patrol (and trying to freak us out by making hyena noises from the tree nearby!).

Once we left the Mara, we spent a night in Kisumu on the banks of Lake Victoria - where whooping hyenas were replaced by grunting hippos - before continuing on to Uganda. After a night in Kampala we'll move on to Lake Bunyonyi - the base for our gorilla treks. We've been told that you can get as close as 5-10m from them - it's going to take all of my self-control not to squeal with excitement when I first see them! Anyway, more on that in a few days time...