Safari

For the past couple of days I've been on safari with James and Maureen (our hosts in Nairobi), one other volunteer and 6 students. It's a lot of time in a car but absolutely worth it. So far we've seen lions (including cubs), warthogs, zebras, all sorts of antelope-like animals, elephants, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, ostriches, lots of beautiful birds that actually fly, water buffalo and wildebeasts. We saw all these animals at Masai Mara. Masai is the tribe made famous for the way they elongate their ears and Mara means "land of scattered bushes). I also had the chance to meet many Masai who worked at the campsite at which we stayed. I was a real tourist of a Masai village- the huts in which they slept were so dark and (as is often shown in pictures) there were so many flies- especially on children's faces. When I returned to camp I found out I had missed the monkeys running around the camp and one of the Masai workers at the camp offered to take me on a walk to see some monkeys. On our way out he grabbed his spear "in case of lions". I let him know that if a lion showed up I intended to leave as quickly as possible. He laughed. We didn't end up seeing any monkeys although we saw a Maribo (bird), a bushbuck and a dikdik (looks like a cross b/w a rabbit and a small deer). He also regaled me with plenty of stories: apparently he sometimes accompanies a filmmaker from Pennsylvania into Tanzania to film pygmies (or that's what I understood from his description, he was a little difficult to understand although since English is an official language, most Kenyans speak it well). He told me that they were "stupid" because they ate baboon and hyena meat instead of antelope and other larger, tastier animals. I didn't really know what to say to that. We hope to see rhinos and flamingos tomorrow and then we head home. Wherever we go it's a long, bumpy and dusty ride.