Chelsea & Rusty's Adventures: Masai Mara Safari

The magical word that everyone seems to associate with Africa; "Safari." All throughout our travels people have asked us if we have already been on, or are going on Safari. Now, we can say yes. We decided East Africa was the best place in the world to go and see animals in their natural habitats, and specifically we felt that Kenya would be the best place to do it, due to the time of year and migration patterns.

We crossed into Kenya overland on some incredibly rough roads and organized a 4 day safari in Masai Mara and Lake Nakuru from Nairobi. For the most part, "BBC" or "Discovery Chanel" episodes showing incredible African wildlife are filmed in Serengeti national park in Tanzania which stretches into Kenya and become Masai Mara. There is an incredible amount of wildlife there which migrates back and forth between the Mara and Serengeti. This time of year the majority of the animals are on the Mara side.

Long story short- we had an incredible time and saw a lot of animals. Enjoy the pictures.

Spotted Hyena trotting past our car

Cool looking bird

More cool looking birds

Female Lion enjoying the shade from the hot afternoon sun. Lions just sleep during the day and nothing seems to bother them. They know their status on the African savannah.

The tail end of the Wildebeast migration. They walk in these great lines across the Savannah and like to walk on established roads. Our driver was enthusiastic about chasing them off the roads.

The Mara is very vast and open, making for some of the best opportunities to see animals.

Male Ostrich

If you look very closely you can see a leopard in this tree. They hunt by hanging out in trees like this until something stops below to take refuge from the sun, then it goes for the throat.

Mamma baboon giving her little one a bath

We took a break on top of lookout hill, it was an incredible view. Little did we know there was a cheetah on the hunt nearby.

Fat lazy enormous hippo, we underestimated how large they were, it gave us a new respect for what we were dealing with in the Okavanga delta.

Crocodile sunning, we wish you could understand how large this monster is.

Hippo family, doing their hippo things. Chelsea thought the babies we so cute.

hippos

a red something or rather, they have weird eyes

Cheetahs, after a kill

Thompsons gazelles, fighting for alpha male position. There were like 20 fine looking gazelles on the sidelines waiting patiently for the victor. Actually they didn't seem to even notice.

Male lion watching as one of the females from a pride is stalking some wildebeast.

Baby lion chillin'

baby lions chillin'

There were a couple of males following this pride of lions, we couldn't tell if they were trying to take over the pride, or just trying to get some of the leftover breakfast

Angry lion

Brothers, apparently brother lions like to hang out together, especially if there is no pride that they belong to. So male lions do hunt together.

Waiting for breakfast

Zebras hanging out, doing the zebra thing. Wildebeast seem to like to hang out with Zebras, you can see them queuing up in the background.

the giant wildebeast queue

Giraffe making it happen with camera. This is his blue steel look.

If you look real close you can see some real teamwork happening here. This could be the most sustainable form of toilet paper around.

This is a man holding onto a semi-truck on his bicycle on a major highway. You may be asking if we were surprised to see this... no, we were not. I wish I could use this means of getting to work myself.

savannah

Elephants on parade

The elephants walk in these packs to protect their young. The adults don't have any real enemies but the young could be attacked by lions.

I thought this was a bird that flew on my arm, it is a giant pooping locust. it pooped and left...

Lookout hill

Look out hill

Panoramic of the Mara

We stayed in this "safari tent." It is a tent with a thatch roof, power, and a shower. Only the power didn't really work and the water wasn't working half the time. We also had this little mouse that was living in there. Late at night we heard noises in the tent, that sound like something was moving rocks around. I got up to inspect and found that the earbuds on my headphones were on one side of the room while the wire were somewhere else. While trying to investigate this strange occurrence the mouse jumped out of my backpack onto the floor and scared Chelsea. She screamed really loud and disturbed the whole savanna. A Masai warrior heard the commotion and came to our tent and dispatched the mouse, a job which I was unable to do, I felt pretty unmanly after he killed it so easily. Although, he had a hunting spear thing.

We happened to see these lions watching a group of wildebeast in the distance. We sat and watched them for a while.

After watching far a few minutes we learned that these lions were honeymooning.

After about 20 seconds in heaven, the male lion gave the female a little love bite, and she returned with a kind of upsetting growl. Apparently the lions spend 7 days mating, during that time they mate about every 10 minutes, or about 500 times a week.

Vultures eating leftovers. We watched these for a while, there was a pecking order in which they ate, the biggest to the smallest.

Yes this is camel milk. Yes they can be milked. Yes I buy some out of curiosity. And yes it does taste strangely of camel.

There are a lot of wheat fields in Kenya, they look so cool with these classically African trees

On our drive to the Mara we saw at least five trucks overturned on the side of the road. It just added to the thrill of the ride, our driver careening down incredibly unsafe roads at unsafe speeds.

Walking out of our camp right into the wild. We had dead animal carcasses all around our camp and just a debilitated barbed wire fence to protect us from all sorts of animals. We heard lions and a lot of hyenas at night..

So glad we had a pair of binoculars. We would watch the animals pass outside of our camp, while masai villagers would just go about their daily doings in the park.

A group of masai women gathering firewood. The Masai live in the park with the animals. They only eat beef, mutton, and drink only cows blood and milk. Lions and other dangerous animals are said to respect them and are known by the red clothing they wear. In order to become a man they have to kill a male lion and skin it while living in the bush for a period of five years. Pretty interesting people, they like to ask for money for taking photos of them, fortunatly I wasnt charged for this shot.