Kenya 2017

August 20_th 2017

Once again this morn­ing our safari start­ed at 6:15am on time in order not to miss the sun­rise. Again the result of the ear­ly get­ting up was a spec­tac­u­lar sun­rise, again with anoth­er tree.

The first ani­mal did not take long to appear. Not far from our camp, two younger male lions walked around their ter­ri­to­ry. We could take a nice pic­ture of them in the morn­ing sun from the front.

A group of five impalas also dis­cov­ered the lions and observed them closely:

I think from a lion’s point of view, we looked the same in the jeep. Except we had weird round glass panes in front of our heads that went “clack clack clack…” But final­ly the two lions were scared away after they came too close to a mobile break­fast tent.

So we start­ed to look for new pho­to oppor­tu­ni­ties. To our sur­prise Eric heard over the radio about a pos­si­ble upcom­ing river­cross­ing of wilde­beest and zebras. Actu­al­ly we had almost giv­en up hope for this spec­ta­cle, but our guide had been informed via mobile phone (yes, this works great in the Masai Mara, even with 3G con­nec­tion - bet­ter than in some regions of Ger­many) by a befriend­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er that wilde­beests and zebras were gath­er­ing on the oth­er side of the Mara Riv­er. So we quick­ly picked up some food at the camp and then head­ed for the Mara Riv­er at the speed of the Paris-Dakar Rally.

Arrived at the Mara riv­er noth­ing had hap­pened yet, the wilde­beest and zebras were still on the oth­er side of the riv­er, dawdling around and test­ing our patience. Again and again some of them went to the shore, only to go back a few min­utes lat­er because they did­n’t dare. Final­ly, after some dri­ving around, we could see two cross­ings, which were not so spec­tac­u­lar, but we were very hap­py about it.

Short­ly after­wards we went back to the camp for lunch. I always used the time to save the pho­tos in the lap­top and on an exter­nal hard disk. At 4pm we start­ed again to the Mara Riv­er, but the oth­er side of the riv­er was com­plete­ly emp­ty this time. But on our side we saw a group of ele­phants wan­der­ing through the land­scape. Among them was a small ele­phant under 6 months old, the ladies were again very pleased (how cuuuuuuuuuute!)

Lat­er we dis­cov­ered a very pho­to­genic group of six giraffes, which moved slow­ly through the plains.