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Considering how popular and beautiful the Maasai Mara is it is a Royal pain in the ass to get to. But get there we did and it is amazing. On the way we stopped off at a Maasai village. The Masai people have really embraced tourism to a huge degree and although we got totally ripped off there it was still very much interesting and worthwhile seeing and hearing their culture of polygamy and lion killing!!!
In the Masai Mara itself there are literally hundreds of thousands of Wildebeest as far as the eye can see. they have now migrated from the Serengeti to the more lush plains of the Mara for the wet season having eaten every last ounce of grass in the Serengeti! The highlights here were seeing a Cheetah totally exhausted post kill (we just missed it!) then getting stuck into the rump of the unfortunate gazelle. An absolutely gorgeous and remarkable Cat it is - and one I have been waiting patiently to see since 1989! We also had two stake outs of a few lions attempting an ambush of zebra, however the canny striped animal on both occasions was well on its toes and the lions went hungry.
In the end we you literally end up tripping over 2 of "The Big Five" - The King of the Junge (can anyone tell me why it has this nickname considering it lives in the wide open plains?) and the Mahoosive Elephant! I think in the end we counted on the entire trip somewhere between 40 and 50 different Lions and Elephants to beat the band, and yet every time you see one you are repeatedly moved by their grace and pure size respectively!
And on from the Masai Mara towards Tanzania containing the Serengeti and the Ngorogoro crater. But not before a stop in Nairobi and John and Sid's heaven of a restaurant called Carnivore. In this case it does exactly as it says on the tin! Essentially you pay $US30 and you eat every kind of meat imaginable until the meat sweats are so great that there is a waterfall coming down your brow! The waiters keep coming to your table with real swords of Beef, Lamb, Chicken, Pork, Turkey, and Crocodile until you lower your white flag in submission. No prizes for guessing who were the last two standing at our table. Ostrich Balls were the other notable meat on the menu. It also goes without saying i bagseyed the surrender flag as a keepsake for the epic meal.
From Nairobi it was southbound towards Tanzania (pronounced in Africa Tan-zan-ya FYI) via another national park called Amboseli. More crap crap roads, but the one from the border town of Nmanga to this park can only be described as sitting on a jackhammer for 50kms. And unfortunately not at 100kmh or infact anywhere near it. By this stage we had changed vehicles for the third time, now riding in Liz, short for Lizard. The problem with our new friend Liz was that once stopping she didn't like starting again and definitely one of the highlights of this trip was for 2 Irish Guys, a Dutch guy and a few Aussies to be be push starting a 5 tonne truck with Mount Kilimanjaro looming in the background and a rather large Hippo looming in the foreground. For those of you who may think that this is no big deal due to our impression of said animal let it be known that these are some of the most territorial animals, they can run faster than humans and are responsible for the most human deaths by wild animals in Africa each year! Awesome stuff!
We spent just one night here, and gazing up at the lofty peak of "Kili" i did feel a tinge of regret that my plan to trek it wouldn't happen this time around. However for sure I will be back and for sure to climb it. Maybe this is no bad thing as the success rate of climbing it apparently for some reason increases with age! So back onto the jackhammer and on towards TanzanYA....
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