A year of adventures

 I knew Kenya was a mostly very coddled experience, but going to Dakar was still quite a shock to my system. First of all, it was hot and sticky and did I mention steamy? I don’t think I’ve sweated that much in my life. Apparently it can be quite temperate most of the year, but I happened to be there in the hot season.  Dakar is on the westernmost edge of the African continent. Then, of course, there was the language barrier - everyone there speaks French, Wollof, and other native languages. Some people spoke some English, but definitely not everyone.  Then there’s the traffic - Dakar is on a point of land, and a big chunk of its center used to be an airport and is still closed off. There are often only two main roads to get from one area to another, and they are just jammed with cars, buses, some motorbikes, and even a few two-wheeled carts pulled by a horse or donkey! At one point it took us 90 minutes to move 5km, and my travel companions marveled that it was the worst traffic they’

To wrap up our safari, our travel planner recommended we spend a few nights at a beach in Kenya. In all my ignorance about Africa, I hadn’t realized that beach vacations were an option!  The place we ended up going was located on an island on the southern Kenya coast, called Chale. We arrived at high tide and took a small motorboat over; when we left it was low tide and we rode in a cart pulled by a tractor across the sandy expanse! The time there was good but three nights was all we needed as there wasn’t a ton to do aside from swim and relax. I hopped in the Indian Ocean the first day and it was warm enough to go all the way in and swim. The second day I went out on a snorkeling boat tour, and the last day we hung out in a shady spot by the pool until it was time to go. It was pretty clearly some kind of shoulder season, as the place didn’t feel full at all.  Even though this was a fairly fancy place, and even though it was pretty hot, we didn’t have power in our cabanas from 10am-5p

 After our visit to northern Kenya, it was lovely to come back south and see green everywhere!  A note about our flights: it was all so casual and was made very easy for us. Our drivers knew where to find us and deliver us, and we just got moved around the country without tracking flight times or changes or anything. I imagine that’s because we were doing a package deal, but it was flawless.  Anyway: if you go on safari to Kenya, the place to go is the Maasai Mara. There’s a Conservacy (public/private partnership) and a reserve (federally managed), and it flows into Tanzania’s famed Serengeti.  We did two full-day game drives and 3 or 4 shorter drives. We saw everything in massive abundance, including baby animals - giraffe, elephant, lion, cheetah, warthog, hippo, topi, gazelle, zebra, wildebeest, baboon, hyena, jackal… and tons of cool birds too.  I can’t possibly post enough pictures and videos to showcase it all.  We stayed in the only lodge that’s fully owned by the Maasai tribe,

 This part of the trip was the best in some ways, and the hardest in others.  Best: bed, lodging setup, hangout area, pool, food, staff. We stayed in a tent camp up on stilts in trees! I could watch giraffes and elephants wander through beneath me at ground level. My bed was super comfy and the sunrise view was gorgeous. Hard: so so so dry. It’s a dry part of the country anyway, and they’ve had two years of severe drought. Our lodging had to truck in water for us, and told is that hot showers weren’t really available - we’d have to run (waste!) a lot of water before we got hot. Everything was brown and dry and a lot of the language of our game drives was about what they used to see and experience.  Still, the people were absolutely lovely, and they did put water in troughs for animals so we regularly saw an elephant herd visit. I felt conflicted about the fact that they had a (not enormous) pool - obviously not the best use of a scarce resource… yet part of getting in those sweet sweet

We were sad to leave our pretty posh lodge, but also very curious to get out of the Land Cruiser and see the Kenyan countryside close up. We were driven from the lodge to a seemingly isolated spot where, sure enough, our guide and spotter were waiting for us!  We learned the three rules of walking safari: 1. Always stay behind the rifle; 2. Don’t run or make sudden moves if we encounter wildlife; 3. If the tell you to run, do it immediately! Fortunately we didn’t need to follow rules 2 or 3.  Camping in Kenya is like camping in Oregon except for the truly massive piles of poop reminding you there are large animals out there! Log suspended from a tree by a barbed wire, and wrapped in more wire, to deter honey badgers. This is a beehive used by the local tribe to collect honey.  Some of our 13 support camels (some are in training). Goodness are grumpy camels noisy! Camp, and one of the bucket showers.  It was a very dry & dusty and overall very interesting landscape. We were cared fo

Friday morning we flew from Nairobi to the Lewa airstrip. The airstrip had a washroom facility and four jeeps/land rovers coming to pick people up and drop others off, but we were otherwise truly in the wilds of Africa.   We quickly found our driver from our lodge, and meandered to the lodge while stopping to admire so many animals! We checked into our (lovely) lodging, had lunch and an afternoon break. (I’ll write a separate post about where we stayed and the rhythms of safari life.) Over the two days at the Lewa Wilderness lodge, we did three game drives - 4pm Friday, 6:30am and 4pm Saturday. Our morning game drive ended with breakfast on the savannah, and then we had the chance to ride a camel back to the lodge! (I can now confirm, 20 minutes on a camel is enough for a lifetime.) Across the game drives, from my notes & pictures, we saw tons of elephants, common zebras, Grevy’s zebras, black vervet monkeys, warthogs, rhinos, gazelles, Cape buffalo, hartebeests, reticulated giraff