Maasai Mara

OK, sixteen different wild cheetahs in just a few days is probably a little over the top I think. Granted four of them were only titchy little cutie cubs, but crikey! We hadn’t come across a single cheetah in the previous months of our pan-African travels up until that point, then all of a sudden we had a superfluity of these lean spotty felines. Oh my goodness gracious me! And lions. We’ve honestly lost track of how many of them we’ve seen. Plus their fuzzy little cubs.

A pride of over a dozen lions we were privileged to observe was having a stand-off with a huge herd of buffaloes. One very brave lioness was standing her ground to protect a tiny little cub which was hiding under a bush, as the massive horns of the brawny buffaloes made an impenetrable semi circle around it. The angry roars of the lioness did make those muscley bovines flinch (and me too), but they maintained their threatening cordon for quite some time, before eventually backing off.

Our hearts dropped back down from their positions in our throats as the fluffy bubby cub snuck out of its hidey hole and rejoined the rest of the pride.

Following that all the lions went back to feasting on the buffalo calf they had just killed. No wonder those adults were so cranky at the cats!

Then there’s all other elephants (with cute little babies in tow), hippos (in and out of the water), lanky yet wonderfully graceful giraffes, etc, etc, etc. The Mara is absolutely chocka block with everything African mega fauna you can imagine.

On our last game drive we joked with our guide, Joseph, that the only thing he hadn’t found for us was a rhino. We explained to him that even in Zimbabwe we had gone to a rhino conservation park that had eighteen rhinos in it, and we drove around for hours without seeing any. So our chances in the Maasai Mara were very slim indeed.

“Never give up.” said Joseph, and within half an hour he managed to locate one in the long grass in a remote part of the reserve. Keeping a healthy distance we tracked this black beastie up a gully as he/she headed towards the mountains. At one point the rhino crossed the track in front of us, maybe ten metres away, stopped and eyed us off, then took a few steps toward our vehicle. Yikes! We thought he might charge! But we remained quiet enough and that lumbering great tonne of armoured muscle turned and continued on its way. How exhilarating!

The scenery of the Mara was jaw droppingly amazing. Stretching out under the huge African sky were vast undulating grassy hills interspersed with clusters of very African trees, bisected by winding hippo and croc filled creeks and rivers. Everywhere were great herds of antelopes of all different descriptions, from tiny dik-diks to the enormous elands. The very pretty thompson gazelles outnumbered most species, but there were still thousands of impala and hundreds of topi all around. Huge numbers of zebra grazed alongside buffalo and wildebeest as troupes of banded mongooses scampered about. On some sweeping hillsides there were lone solitary trees, the bottom branches trimmed clean by giraffes and elephants, and each seeming to have an untidy vulture or eagle nest atop them, with clusters of grassy weaver bird nests tangled amongst the lower branches.

The Mara is an environment sculpted by the animals, low trees pruned hard by the elephants and tall trees trimmed by giraffes. Watercourses modified by crowds of hippos and even small creeks altered by wallowing buffalo, warthogs and hyenas. The grasslands are maintained by the enormous herds of herbivores, stretching to the horizon’s distant hills of the rift valley, each shadowed dramatically by the setting Sun.

The stunningly beautiful Maasai Mara is our new favourite place on the planet.

What follows is a tiny selection of the many thousands of photos we took.