The Mara...Again...With Ida And Bob

It’s the second week of Ida and bob’s visit and we are now off to the Masai Mara. We are especially excited because it’s the ‘hi season’ there. The wildebeest are migrating! Bob and Ida seem like they are acclimating to the traveling conditions well and I have borrowed a new toy for the drive. A GPS unit. I am now hooked on these things. I didn’t see much point in them in the states but here they are really valuable. The best part to me is if it tells you that you are 10 minutes from town xyz then you really are! And since signage here is really rare this is a good thing, especially if someone has to pee or you want to know how long you have left to put up with screaming kids before you can take a break.

We set out early; take two cars again, the road is far better then the previous trip so that helps. We made our mistake while on the dirt road, guess I just didn’t trust that the gps had all these Kenyan dirt roads mapped in it so I started to ask some of the locals which way to go when we approached a fork. Seems the gps told me we were off course but according to the map even if we were off the road we wanted the road we were on could take us there too so we continued…until the road narrowed so much it looked like a path and it was in the middle of a farm field and no sign of the town we were headed to and there were signs we were about to drive thru what is know around here as ‘black cotton mud’ which is a scary thing to drive in. so we turned back to the fork we made our wrong turn on, it was only two hours out of the way…. Note to self, don’t always trust Kenyan maps or the local passers-by DO trust my gps!














So the hotel was great as usual, our second time there (Kichwa Tembo Tented Camp) and we had the most unbelievable time. The migration was better then expected. SO many wildebeest you can’t imagine; millions of them. And lots of lions that were acting like they had won one of those supermarket shopping sprees at Costco or something. We actually saw a lion stalk and kill a wildebeest; very intense. Apparently a rare thing to witness. Our car was within 20 feet as it happened. The thing that struck me was the whole process was completely silent. The only thing we heard was the lion rapidly breathing thru her nose as she held the wildebeest’s throat closed until, well you know… Before she started… dinning…. we asked the driver to move on. I was not too interested in watching this portion of things; pretty graphic and Max was already wondering what she was doing “getting ready to have her lunch” I told him.

We visited another Masai village. A little touristy for us now but it was fun anyway. They are mostly cattle ranchers. At night they herd them into the center of their compound to protect the cows from being eaten by lions. As you might imagine their compound is covered with cow dung. Max kept warning grandma ida ‘not to step in the cow dang’ and Esther learned to do the famous Masai jumping dance, which does all the time now. I’ll have to video and post it….Lots more photos of our trip.