Kenya 2017

August 19_th 2017

Again we were nice­ly wok­en at 5:30am by our Masai who brought cof­fee and some cook­ies. At 6:15 we met again with Eric at the jeep and looked for a new loca­tion for a new sunrise:

Due to the light morn­ing mist the light­ing mood was com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent again. After­wards we drove to the Mara Riv­er to see if a riv­er cross­ing (the famous riv­er cross­ing of the big herds of wilde­beest and zebra) was to be expect­ed. Unfor­tu­nate­ly there were no larg­er groups there, so that at least on this day a cross­ing was not to be expect­ed. We had break­fast again under the open sky direct­ly on the banks of the Mara River.

High­light of the morn­ing game dri­ve were two hand­some lion broth­ers, which we could observe for more than 1 1/2 hours. In the begin­ning they did what cats love to do most: they lay in the grass and slept.

So that they did not get any com­pres­sion marks, they repo­si­tioned them­selves every few min­utes, oth­er­wise very lit­tle hap­pened at first. But final­ly they were obvi­ous­ly so annoyed by us that they stood up after all, some nice pho­to motives resulted.

With the heat increas­ing at mid­day we returned to the camp where Obi was wait­ing for us for lunch.

In the after­noon at 16:00 we met again at the jeep and Eric asked what we want­ed to see today. Just for fun I said “A leop­ard would be nice”, where­upon Eric drove straight to a small for­est and slow­ly drove around search­ing. And indeed, he final­ly found a female leop­ard - incredible.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly she only showed up for a short time and then dis­ap­peared again in the for­est. Since it was already late, we looked again for a beau­ti­ful place for our sunset.

After sun­set and already on the way back to the camp Eric dis­cov­ered two young leop­ards on a bank slope, prob­a­bly the off­spring of the female leop­ard we had seen before. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it was already very dark in the dusk after sun­set, nev­er­the­less, still some pre­sentable pic­tures could be taken:

The pic­tures were tak­en after sun­set with my 400mm lens at an aper­ture of 3.2, expo­sure times of 1/40 and 1/50 sec­onds and ISO 4000 or 6400 with the lens lying on a bean bag. It is unbe­liev­able what is pos­si­ble with mod­ern cameras!

Back at the camp we met after a short refresh­ment at the camp­fire for a gin & ton­ic, after­wards we had again a very tasty din­ner under the open sky.