I don’t have internet access right now to check out the website “Stuff White people like” but if I did, I would make sure “Safari” is on the list. While I am at it, I would go ahead and add “Mission work” to that list-you’ll see why.
Getting your flight time changed in Kenya is surprisingly permissive-many of the domestic carriers allow you to change your flight at least one time. I was originally scheduled to leave Kenya Nov 1st but got a Safari arranged thanks to Bethany’s hard work. She ended up calling Jetlink around 4 times before giving up in frustration because she clearly did not sound like a Daniel. When I called, I swear it was procedure to put a pillowcase over the phone receiver then talk through a Kazoo. There was no clarity to the calls and their English was terrible. After several calls I received the same answer, I needed to pay an additional $11 to change my flight because my “flight class” was sold out (BTW, there’s no first class, everything is economy on these small jets or prop planes). She was unable to accept the payment differential over the phone or online, I would have to go to the airport to get my ticket changed-which was about a 30 min drive away. I was lucky enough to hitch a ride there on an ambulance going to Kisumu where my ticket was changed out in less than 5 minutes with no additional fee. While waiting the 2 hours for the ambulance to come back, I talked with the pilots and the flight crew of Jetlink about world and Kenyan politics and history until my ride showed up.
The next day, I said goodbye to everyone at the hospital and headed to the Kisumu airport to get to Nairobi to pick up my safari group the next day. I stayed at an interesting hostel which had you sleeping in a tent in the garden of the owner’s house. A lot of people really like this place but as I was going to find out in the next few days-sleeping in a tent kind of sucks. It gets REALLY cold in Kenya at night around 1-2 am when the temp drops into the 50s and tents don’t insulate as well as I thought. I woke up to visible breath in my tent and shivering and curled in the fetal position to stay warm. After a basic breakfast, a driver from my tour group showed up to take me to the Safari offices in downtown Nairobi. While in those offices, I met the first of the 4 passengers that would be joining me-Charlotte from the UK. She had been in Africa for 2 months now, going through Tanzania, Rowanda, Uganda, Zanzibar, and Kenya. Most of the white people I would meet on Safari were from the UK. She dressed a little too fashionably for a tent safari-wearing designer sunglasses and fashion. She was the biggest complainer on the trip and would whine about standard African things like the concept of “African time” and that white people are going to get ripped off-wah wah. Several times during the Safari she told the driver to pull over so she could pee behind the van. The driver isn’t supposed to let people out of the van, but she would ask enough he would do it anyway. I think the driver had long ago devised a way to handle this annoyance-he installed a mirror on the back of his van that angled straight down so all the passengers still on the van could watch the girls pee behind the van-after seeing that 500th zebra, this was actually a pretty good source of entertainment.
During the nearly 6 hour drive to the Masai Mara we get 3 other travelers-Teresa a German tourist, and Simon and Elisa a couple of aid workers working for an NGO. The road to Masai mara is relatively unpaved and filled with tons of dips in the dirt roads but we made it there ok. Along the way, it’s just desert like savannah with the occasional massive herds of cattle being let by a man or boy in the characteristic red masai cloth. Around 4 pm we arrive at our tent camp. The tents were a bit odd-they were tents with 2 twin beds in them, but attached to the back is a bathroom! After throwing down our things we headed off on an evening game drive in the park. We oohed and ahhed and the herds of zebras, giraffes, warthogs, impalas etc. The safari van has a pop-up top so you can stand in the van and take pictures and videos. We did about 12 hours of driving around the park over 3 days-it takes several hours to get from one end of the park to the other it is so massive. I took about 300 pictures and videos which was basically all that you could do (and watch girls pee behind the van). A few things about the safari really stick out in my mind.
-Being 10 feet from lions
-Seeing about 25 hippos in the Mara river and a 95 year old 18 ft crocodile.
-Watching thousands of Wildebeest migrate across the planes (they weren’t doing the legendary crossing of the Mara river while I was there though).
-Seeing a male ostrich doing a mating dance for a female ostrich
-Watching 2 lions eat a huge buffalo
-Watching 2 cheetahs tear apart a gazelle
-Watching huge flocks of vultures tear apart wildebeest corpses
-Seeing wildebeest body parts hanging from a tree after a leopard put it there for an afternoon snack.
Notice a theme in the last few things? After you see the same animals over and over again, the tour groups (which are mostly westerners and from industrialized nations) demand BLOOD! You might be plodding along at a 10-15 miles an hour when you hear something in swahili come over the CB radio and your driver starts tearing ass through the park. “There’s been a kill!”, he would announce and I could see Charlotte salivate-it was really the only thing on safari that excited her. You can usually identify the kills from half a mile away because 8-12 safari vans will be mere feet from the carnage white people with expensive SLR cameras and designer safari gear oohing and ahhing as entrails are ripped out from a poor herbivore. The bleached white skeletons of the animals looking almost as if they had been placed there for added effect by park rangers they were so intact and clean. One thing I didn’t see was any mating-which is odd considering at times I was looking at herd of hundreds or even thousands of buffaloes and wildebeest-I certainly expected at least some of them to be doing it. I mean, if you put thousands of people in a single place, I would expect at least a few of them to be doing it-as I type this CNN is airing right now that 300,000 people were at Atlanta’s pride parade and certainly plenty of people there were doing it (although likely different end objectives)! The evening and afternoon safaris were filled with awesome sights and the weather was relatively cool with some occasional rain. On the final day, we did a morning safari at dawn which was a complete wash-barely any animals were seen.
The food was all included in our package and every night they cooked great dinner and even better breakfasts! The biggest issue was the tents-the first night there I woke up at 2am and started freaking out. The only power to the tent camp is from a generator which they only ran about 2-3 hours a day and not at all after dark. When the sun went down, it was complete blackness outside and inside the tent. There’s no locking or security and while I was at the wildebeest, one group of backpackers told me that they had their tent slashed open and their luggage stolen. In the complete blackness in the strange land of the masai mara I got really anxious especially because people were walking around outside my tent. The other issue was I wouldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time before I would wake up scratching all over my skin. So many nights in Kenya I would wake up over and over with the sensation of being covered in bugs but this was the real deal. By Sunday morning, my arms were covered in petchial rashes that is either from bug bites while I was asleep-the other option is I have a rickettsial infection like rocky mountain spotted fever and will soon be dead. Somatisizing my symptoms on Sunday, I got nauseous and threw up during the morning safari but I think it was because of my doxycycline-all and all safari was pretty cool but I can’t see doing it longer than 3 days-we were all pretty bored. I had met folks that were doing 30 day safaris all around africa. In 3 days, we saw everything you wanted to see except a rhino, 30 days would really suck and it’s expensive as hell. Maybe one of the most interesting parts of the safari was actually meeting and talking to the people who were on them. If you are a white person that is in Africa for a period of time, more than likely it’s to do mission work or charity work. I should write a book about it called “If it ain’t Hell, it ain’t worth visiting”. Simon, Charlotte, and Elisa were all working for charity organizations and it was hard to have a good conversation with my group because they have all traveled around the world-mainly backpacking through affordable 3rd world hellholes. You should see their eyes light up talking about having to experience firsthand such extreme poverty (before taking advantage of favorable exchange rates to eat like kings wherever they go). I just couldn’t relate to the stories of rural vietnam (everyone in my group had traveled there but me-wtf!)-totally bizarre. This entry picks up in “Falling from the sky” check it out!
Hard Lessons in Swahili-
How are you supposed to give the middle finger when this happens?
Mtoto aliyezaliwa alikuwa na vidole sita
The born baby had six fingers
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