The Mara

Last weekend, I went to Maasai Mara National Park with a few friends of mine. We left Kisumu at 6am on Friday morning and got to the park around 11am after 3 hours of good roads and 2 of hours of absolutely horrible roads. We drive in over this ridge and you look out and its just the best view ever. So we start driving through the park and immediately we're seeing herds of elephants, tons of zebras, wildebeest, antelopes and gazelles. We stopped by the river and saw huge hippos lounging around. After being in the park for like 20 minutes, our driver pulls a u-turn and we speed off the road through a random field and all the sudden we are legitimately 5 yards from a huge male lion just sitting on the ground. I was totally scared but of course, still hanging out the top of the car to take good pictures haha. It was unreal...

Later in the day we saw a leopard which had just killed a zebra and was eating it. We also went off roading and saw cheetahs lounging around. Buffaloes were everywhere and so we giraffes. We left the park on the far side from where we cam in and stayed at our lodge for the night. It was a tented camp, but each tent was huge and had 2 beds in it and was attached to a small concrete room with a toilet and hot shower. It was perfect.

We got up really early Saturday morning and went to search for more animals, especially a rhino. On the way we stopped to see a female lion which had just eaten a cow. It was still sitting near the cow and guarding it against all the vultures nearby which wanted to eat the rest of the carcass. We watched for about 30 mins as the lion would start to slowly walk away as the vultures creeped closer, the lion would turn back and look at the birds and they would freeze, then it would turn back and continue away. After walking 30 yards or so, it would turn and run back towards the carcass and the vultures would fly away. Pretty sweet to watch, especially because the lion walked directly in front of our car. Later on, we saw a pride of four male lions who would have been rebels in their original prides, but left and joined together. It was wild!

We saw a mom and baby elephant drinking from a watering hole and we were basically about 4 feet from there. It was so cute. We searched for a rhino the whole day but unfortunately didn't see one. During the morning, we saw the leopard again really close up and it was definitely the coolest animal we saw the whole time. The colors were so cool and bright and we were lucky because most people on safaris don't usually see leopards.

The whole landscape of the Mara is amazing and so beautiful. I always think tourists who go on safari are so corny, but it was hands down the coolest thing ever (or at least right up there with bungee jumping over the Nile...). Sunday morning we got to drive back through the park again, so we spent basically 3 days in the car just looking at beautiful views and cool animals. It was exhausting, but so worth it.