Our August, 2011 African Safari adventure began and ended in Nairobi, Kenya. We were picked up by Impact Adventures (our Kenyan guides) at Nairobi’s NBO airport and driven to our hotel where we intended to spend the rest of the night and the next day recuperating from our long flight. However, as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men.
Around the breakfast table on our “rest day”, we decided we needed to do something – after all photographers cannot just sit around a hotel all day when there is shooting to be done. Therefore, we decided to do a game drive through Nairobi National Park.
The park entrance is actually inside the city limits of Nairobi, making us a little skeptical of what we would see. Incredible as it sounds, we not only saw lions within an hour of entering the park but giraffes, antelopes, warthogs, zebras, and numerous bird species all with Nairobi’s sky-scrapers providing the background.
This is not a zoo, there are not any fences, lions and other animals roam freely – maybe they go to town to shop on Saturday night when the market is full.
From our rest day on, the safari just kept getting better. I will mention a few of the species we saw in each of the areas we visited but certainly not all.
After crossing into Tanzania with Maasai Wandering, (our Tanzania Guides) we visited Arusha NP in Tanzania with perhaps 110,000 Pink Flamingos on Big Momela Lake. Momela in Swahili mean Pink. Swahili is the national language in Kenya and Tanzania.
Still in Arusha NP, we photographed our way through the rain forest around Mt Meru photographing Colobus monkeys, bushbucks, zebras, and numerous birds.
On our first attempt, we were extremely lucky and were able to photograph two separate crossings at different locations with several thousand wildebeest crossing each time. The sight is really beyond my vocabulary to describe! This annual event – consisting of more than 1,500,000 wildebeests, 500,000 gazelles, and 200,000 zebras constantly on the move, searching for fresh grass and water – it really is one of the wonders of the world.
After several days on the Serengeti, it was time to move on. I should mention however that August is the dry season, so we only got stuck once.
From the Serengeti we crossed back into Kenya and onto the Masai Mara.
It was on the Masai Mara that we photographed Africa’s big five (lion, leopard, rhino, elephant and Cape buffalo) in just under three hours! What a thrill. On the Mara, as it’s sometimes called, we were able to shoot male lions resting in the early morning light. We also photographed a cheetah surveying the countryside from an old termite mound. Late one afternoon we photographed a female Black rhino nursing her calf.
Unfortunately we missed a wildebeest herd of 5 to 8 thousand crossing the Mara river by about 40 minutes What a bummer.
From the Masai Mara we headed back to Nairobi and our flight home. What a let down, twelve days of adventure – now we have to go back to our real world, not the world of our dreams.
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