Jambo!

Hello again from the Maasai Mara!  It's been a long and wonderful week so far.  Since my last post we have driven to Samburu, Kenya from Nairobi, spent a couple of days watching monkeys, baboons, cheetah, cape buffalo, rhinoceros, lions, and flamingos along with a multitude of water fowl and other birds.  We then flew to the Maasai Mara in a fleet of Cessna Caravans - about a 90-minute flight at low altitudes over the Kenyan countryside to the Mara.  It was impressive to see the forests, pastures, and farms of cattle below as we flew overhead.  We saw various types of farming, from centuries-old practice of semi-nomadic slash-n-burn farm plots to massive crop-circles of modern commercial agriculture.  All in stark contrast within minutes of each other. 

Once we landed at a dirt airstrip in the Mara, we boarded safari vehicles for a drive to Little Governor's Camp.  Almost immediately we found a pride of lions only minutes from the airstrip!  Nobody expected the lions to be that close, and not in the first 15 minutes of our drive.  Since then we've seen more lions - a pride with 10-15 cubs playing (way too cute for words! pictures later...), a pair of cheetah climbing onto the canvas roof of a safari vehicle to camp-out for a while and get the high-ground while hunting, a river full of 20+ hippos...  herds of cape buffalo, topi, gazelles, water bucks...  The Mara is an seriously majestic place.

We've been moving constantly - except for a couple of hours between lunch and our afternoon drives.  Just enough time to download photos and recharge batteries.  Not much time for editing.  Hopefully I can get some photos uploaded sooner rather than later.

Hakuna Matata!