Africa Overland Part 5 – Maasai Mara

After leaving Uganda behind, we crossed the border back into Kenya and headed to Kericho where we stayed at a campsite with very basic bathrooms but beautiful grounds surrounded by tea plantations and mountain views. It rained quite a bit while we were there but our tents kept us nice and dry. In the morning we drove to the Maasai Mara National Reserve. We made a stop at a Maasai village where we learned about their culture.

The Maasai women in the village we visited usually do most of the manual labor type work, including building the houses, and the men often have multiple wives. In the village we visited, traditionally daughters have been traded as wives in exchange for cows but they are working to move away from that practice in their culture and give women the chance to go to school. The Maasai women make incredible bead work jewelry by hand and we were given the opportunity to buy some directly from them. The Massai men wear beautiful outfits of bright plaid capes in red shades and beautiful jewelry. They invited us to sing and dance with them and the Maasai men did their famous jumping dance where one man jumps higher than the previous. Music and dance are a common language everyone can relate to and bond over.

As soon as we reached our campsite, which was just outside the Maasai Mara National Reserve gate, we left the overland truck there and headed out in safari jeeps with guides to take an evening game drive in the park. We saw several lions off in the distance, including a lion eating a zebra. We also saw a solitary male elephant. We were treated to a gorgeous sunset while leaving the park and enjoyed a relaxing dinner and wine back at the campsite.     

In the morning we had breakfast at the campsite and then headed out with picnic lunches to enjoy a full day game drive in Maasai Mara National Reserve. Once we drove into the park a good way, we came across a family of elephants, including several young elephants. I love seeing elephant families together. It is fascinating to watch the way they interact with each other. Elephants are highly intelligent and have excellent memories. They mourn the deceased members of their family by revisiting where they died.

We also saw large dazzles of zebra and towers of giraffes, which are delightful to watch as their movements are so elegant and graceful. The safari guides communicate over the radio in the jeeps on game drives so when they find interesting wildlife they can tell the other guides. Our guide heard over the radio that there was something special ahead and we raced to a ravine where we were treated to seeing a leopard lounging on the ground in a spot where we could clearly view him for quite a while. Leopards are often elusive so this was a special treat.

We drove on from there and came across a gorgeous cheetah laying in the shade of a bush and we were able to get close enough to see the animal’s gorgeous teardrop face markings and spotted coat. Amazingly the cheetah did not run away as we slowly crept by in the jeep.

We also spotted ostriches, topis, gazelles, a serval, a crocodile, giraffes, warthogs, wildebeests, and another large herd of elephants. In one section of the park alone we saw around eight lions lying around and either napping or resting in the shade.

We were also surprised to see that the Great Migration of wildebeests, where around two million animals travel from the Serengeti in Tanzania to Maasai Mara in search of more food and water, had already begun. We saw a large number of wildebeests, we guessed in the hundreds of thousands, with zebras mixed in among them walking together in a massive group as part of the migration. It was an amazing thing to witness and a complete surprise to see since it is early in the season for them to be migrating.

For our last meal together as a full group at our campsite in Maasai Mara, our cook Peace prepared us an amazing feast of stuffed roasted butternut squash, sukuma wiki, ugali, and chapati, basically all my absolute favorite Kenyan dishes. The next day we packed up our tents and drove back to Nairobi where we had started the tour. At this point the first leg of our overland tour ended and about half our group departed to head home and about half of us stayed on to complete the next leg of the tour, which will include traveling overland from Nairobi, Kenya to Zanzibar, Tanzania. We will also have different tour leader, cook, and driver so we said goodbye to our fantastic Intrepid crew. After spending every day and night together for almost two weeks our group felt like our travel family and it was rather sad to say goodbye.