Safari Shmafari

Put your arms straight out to each side of your body. Stretch them out as far as possible. Look to the left hand…look to your right…that’s about how much we loved our Spring Break this year (yeah…THAT much!) It was amazing. Kara and I were trying to remember what we did last year for Spring Break...still working on that one and if you happen to remember for us, please remind me by sending an email to bslatercwu@hotmail.com

Alright, on to this year’s Spring Break. Close your eyes (don’t really, because then you won’t be able to read this.) I want you to envision Lions, Cheetahs, Leopards, Elephants, Giraffe(? Plural ?), Gazelles, Black Rhinos, White Rhinos, Zebras, Ostriches, Flamingos, Eagles, Cranes, Vultures and a zillion other different types of birds, Hippos, Crocodiles, Hyenas, Topy, Waterbuck, Jackals, Water Buffalos, and an assortment of beautiful landscapes. No…you’re not in Disney World’s Animal Kingdom (although they do an awesome job of replicating what an actual safari is similar to). You are in Kenya with Bryan, Kara, John and Pam (Kara’s parents) in the Sanburu region, Lake Nkuru, and the infamous Maasai Mara.

We left on Friday the 6th of April on a red-eye flight to Nairobi, Kenya (Site of Bin-Laden’s first attack on America when he bombed the US Embassy.) When we arrived, we met John and Pam (who arrived a day earlier) in the lounge of the beautiful Sarova Stanley Hotel, built at the turn of the 20th century. We ate a quick breakfast and headed off to the Sanburu Game Reserve just North of Nairobi.

Along the way (approximately a 5 hour drive or so), we passed the Equator and saw the Coriolis Effect up close and personal. It was pretty cool. As we moved 20 meters or so away from the equator North to South, the water drained clockwise to counterclockwise. It was pretty impressive. Right on the equator, the water drained straight down. Both John and I had our GPS devices out and it was a few feet off, but not too bad to say the least.

We finally reached Sanburu. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the animals as Pam will be doing a presentation on the animals we saw and I don’t want to steal her thunder. I will, however, post her notes online when we get a copy of them after they return from the remainder of their “Spring Break” (Retirement must be awesome) in Switzerland.

You do need to know, before I go any further, about the “Big 5”. The “Big 5” are the 5 animals that take some people several safari’s to see: The Lion, Leopard (the hardest of the Big 5 to find), the Elephant, Water Buffalo, and Rhinoceros. After our 5 hour drive to Sanburu and our first game drive that evening, we had the hardest of the Big 5 checked off of our list after seeing not one, but TWO separate Leopards.

On a side note, the 200mm-500mm lens Kara and I got over Christmas Break was AMAZING!

Our tour guide, Mohamad was awesome having been a safari guide for over 18 years. We rode around in a van that had a pop-up top so that we could see 360 degrees and take pictures from any angle we needed to.

Sanburu was amazing, for Kara and I, our favorite spot of the entire trip. The landscape reminded us of an area very similar to Wenatchee without the Evergreen forest. Dry, rolling hills, lots of trees, just not the evergreens we’re used to. We stayed for 2 nights there and then headed off to Lake Nkuru to see thousands of Pink Flamingos. On our second day in Sanburu, we were driving along, minding our own business checking out some Gazelle when all of a sudden, every single Gazelle’s head shot up, ears at attention. They heard something we didn’t. So our guide told us something was coming. We waited and sure enough, two female lions come sauntering around the corner. We were in a perfect spot as we could see the lions and the Gazelle, but the Lions nor the gazelle could see each other. When the lions came into sight of the gazelle, they shot off and escaped. The lions just kept on walking, almost disinterested in the small creatures. (On another side-note, we didn’t see anything get eaten or even hunted, that’s for the next safari).

Lake Nkuru was pretty cool…Flamingo’s stink and Rhino’s are huge. That’s about it for that stop. The animals were very easy to spot, so there wasn’t really any sort of challenge…kind of like Animal Kingdom in Disney World. The thing we liked so much about Sanburu was the hunt (so to speak). Animals blended in with the surrounding vegetation so well, so when you found animals, it was like “YEAH!!! FOUND ONE!” We had a game drive where we literally joined a pack of elephants…that was one of the more scarier moments as the elephants were roughly 3 times the size of our van in both size and weight. The lumbered by glancing over at us. A few of the males were duking it out for male dominance so that was fun to watch; so long as we didn’t get stuck in between them.

There I go getting off track, please forgive me if I do that a few times. The elephant story was actually from Sanburu.

After Lake Nkuru, we headed off to the Maasai Mara…famous for the 7th Natural Wonder of the World, the Great Migration of the Wildebeests in July as they move North from the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania. We saw a few Wildebeest but not enough to classify as a “Great Migration.” In the Maasai Mara, we saw a lot of Lions, Zebras, Thomson Gazelle, and Elephants. We also saw the leftover carcass from a Leopard’s kill hanging from a tree, horns and all! Pretty cool huh? We missed a pretty cool event on our last day that we found out about from some friends me met from Vancouver, Canada. They saw a lioness get attacked by 11 Hyena’s. She was fighting them off when all of a sudden, 3 or 4 of her sisters came to her aid and jumped in the fight. Gangfights don’t just happen in Tacoma apparently. We later found out that often times, Lions will kill Hyena’s and not even eat them…just kill them to kill them. We also found out, when we visited the Maasai tribe that there is a fear triangle. The Maasai have domesticated dogs to help warn them of predators. Here’s how the triangle works: The domestic dog fears the Cheetah. The Cheetah fears the Hyena (don’t ask me why because I don’t know.) The Hyena fears the domestic dog (once again, don’t ask). Thought that was interesting enough to write…learn something new everyday.

Anyway, we stayed in the Mara for 2 nights, and enjoyed the sights. We saw 3 cheetah brothers just after they killed a gazelle. They were sooooo fat. When we left, we drove 5 hours or so back to Nairobi to stay in our suite (Yeah…how awesome was that. We had 2 bathrooms, 2 tv’s, a living room area, huge bed, and tons of closets and we didn’t even have to ask for it! Luck of the draw I guess.)

We’ll definitely be going on another safari…it was too good to only do once. We’d like to tell everybody that if you’ve never been on one, it’s the trip of a lifetime. Truly life-changing and awe-inspiring. It gives you hope for the big cats (as the Discovery channel often portrays them nearing extinction). They are doing just fine and are well protected by the Kenyan authorities. Kara will be doing a blog later to fill in some of the gaps that I left out and once again, we’ll be posting Pam’s journal on here when we get a copy of it! Thanks for reading and enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them!

P.S. The pictures are in no particular order. If you want higher resolution copies of the pictures, you'll have to catch us on skype so we can transfer them to you or send us an email and we'll upload the pics. We're looking forward to hanging out with a particular family in Vancouver this summer and enlarging some of these on the new Hewlett Packard Canvas printer (the wedding picture is amazing John, thanks so much for that!) Talk to you all soon!