Since my friend/colleague Diane was in town for work, and she was going on a safari I decided to join her for a night. I arrived back from Tanzania on Friday night and left Saturday for Masai Mara. Got two game drives, one on Saturday night and one Sunday morning and we were back in Nairobi by Sunday afternoon.
It's an expensive evening but so worth it! Ended up staying at the exact same place I stayed before.
Except this time we got the free upgrade so the tent was pretty amazing. The best part of the room though was the dik-diks that lived outside the tent (tiny little dear-like things).I realized that you can't see everything in two drives - Diane said she saw cheetahs and hippos on her first two drives (which we didn't see again). And the contrast between when I was there in September where the animals seemed to be EVERYWHERE and this time where we could drive for 40 minutes and not see a single animal (not even an impala or gazelle) was pretty stark. But we saw quite a few lions
(a single male with the coveted black mane, a group of females and cubs that I think were the same ones I saw in September, and a group of young males sunning themselves). We chased a rhino who seemed totally freaked out and was running really fast in zig-zag motions. And there were giraffes, a few zebras (they were everywhere before), some elephants, and the expected impalas, thompson gazelles, hartebeests, etc. My goal was to be able to identify the various gazelle things and tell them apart. I think I really only mastered the hartebeest. I guess the only thing I saw this time that I hadn't seen before was the jackal. The nicest part was spending time with the lions. They really looked like cuddly big cats and it was tempting to go lay in the sun with them. It's hard to remember that they are brutal.
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