Miss Lily

 

The last stop on my 7 weeks of traveling turned out to be one of my favorites. After a couple of days on a dairy farm in Nakuro we arrived at the Fish Eagle Camp site at Lake Naivasha. We spent one night there watching the hippos at night and waking up from fish eagles calling and marabou storks flying in between the tents. With their wing span of around 3 meters they are not quiet when taking off and the hyenas calling at night around the camp also made it a very special place.

 

The day after we arrived the team of three that were left on the truck were taken by our guide John and driver Tonny to the famous Masai Mara. By now I had been on quite a few game drives both before and during the trip and although I hate to admit it I was not as excited about it as a couple of weeks ago. I had also heard that Kenya's parks are overrated and over crowded and Serengeti is better etc. etc. You could say that my expectations were average, in the middle of both the amazing and quite negative reputation that the park is having. 

 

After spending only minutes in the park I can easily say that it is my favorite game reserve in Africa so far. The endless plains of green grass and small acacia trees creates a wilderness that I have not seen before. This is exactly how I have always pictured Africa's wild nature but yet not truly seen! It might have been the fact of low season but we drove around without seeing a car or person for miles and miles. The Mara is so flat that you can see kilometers each way at all times and the hills on the sides creates such beauty to the landscape. 

 

You sometimes go for hours without seeing anything, even animals, but that does not matter because I have never felt as free as driving on those plains. There are not many roads so you drive on the grass which adds to the wild feeling,  bouncing around on the plains in between bushes and water holes is just the best feeling and although moments when asking the driver if we would be able to get out to the road again and my muscles aching afterwards, it was for the first time proper game drives. 

 

We were very lucky regarding animals, due to the size of the Mara (second largest in Africa) some might find only a few bucks or buffalos when driving around. We had amazing trackers in John and Tonny however and saw herds of 40-50 elephants first thing. We searched for hours for a female lion with cubs which was an adventurous drive on the river banks and in bushes. We had to give up when time was running out and Tonny had to push the van to its max to get to the gate before closing. We did have time to find another lion in the middle of the road and take many pictures of the gorgeous sunset before checking out and heading to camp though :).

 

The next day we sat off before sunrise for our second drive and as usual we had the big cats as our goal. The park does not have many rhinos and the ones they have are rarely seen. Our goal as very spoilt tourists was therefore to see four of the big five in one day. We started off amazingly as after 45 min John had tracked the beautiful big cat with the name Leopard to a certain part of the reserve. The leopard is the hardest to find and even if you know where it is it is a master at hiding and very shy. So when Stuart pointed at a tree asking "is that a monkey or..?" and Tonny laughed and said "No that's a leopard", we raved with excitement of finding it ourselves and not through someone telling us in the radio. We only got a few minutes with it before it climbed down beyond visibility but that added to the feeling that we found it just in the right moment. 

 

Later we found two hyenas walking on the road, jackals in the grass, giraffes and herds of elephants again, this time with a tiny baby that John reckoned was only two weeks old. We drove around a corner and got stuck in the middle of another herd later on also with small baby elephants that I just wanted to take home. 

 

Our mission was not over yet though, as our guides seemed to be determined to find the lovely lion aswell this day. We drove up and down hills bouncing around trying to hold on while looking in every bush and trying to scan the grass. We got stuck in a ditch in the middle of the savannah and I had to drive while the guys were pushing it forward until we finally got out. After that, rocks and sticks had to be put underneath for us to be able to push it uphill to the path again. We finally got out and continued our search about 20 minutes more and then we saw them, two females resting under a bush in the shade. Beautiful cats! Our goal was completed and we departed from the Masai Mara with not only the beauty of it still intact in our memories but also the fulfillment of the animals we were able to see in such a short time. 

 

A memory stuck with me forever.