Friday
morning the safari vans came to the hotel to pick us up at 8:30 to take us to
the safari park. It was a four-hour drive yet, two of which would be an
interesting ride. The first two hours weren’t bad and we made a pit stop at a
lookout point that looked over the Rift Valley. It was a little foggy as you
can tell from the pictures, but cool to see non-the-less.
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| Our Safari Group at Rift Valley |
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| Looking into the Rift Valley |
Around noon we
stopped at a little café to have some lunch. To none of our surprise, it was
rice, noodles, and potatoes. (At this point in my trip, I would literally
sacrifice my first born for a Big Mac). After lunch it was on the road again.
When we got back in the van our driver warned us that the next half of the trip
was going to be on a rather rough road. He wasn’t joking. About fifteen minutes
down the road he says, “here we are…the bad road”. It was two fun filled hours
of driving down a gravel road that hadn’t ever been maintained. There were
potholes and huge rocks. In some places it was smoother to drive in the ditch,
so we did. It was similar I’m sure you’re thinking that we drove down this road
nice and slow…not at all!! Our driver went about 50 mph the whole way down it.
There are times that I am sure all four wheels of the van were off the ground.
Followed by, of course, all four wheels slamming into the hard ground as all of
held on for dear life. It was impossible to sleep and even hard to breathe
because of the dust swirling around in the van.
We
finally made it to the place where we would be staying. It was called “Rhino
Tented Camp.” We all split up into groups of about three people and I happened
to be in the one group of four girls. Since we had four we got to stay in a
room that was made of all bricks. The rest of the people had the thick canvas
military style tents. We had a bathroom that had a toilet (I specify because
most of the places we go simply have holes in the ground), a sink, and a
showerhead. Not an actual shower….just the showerhead in the corner of the
room. We were informed by the staff at the place, to keep all the windows and
doors shut and the tent fronts zipped all the way so that the monkeys don’t
come in and take your things…apparently that happens all the time there. We
were also told not to leave the gate of the property because all of the animals
that we would see on safari are still out there at night and it can be very
dangerous since they go out to hunt at night.
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| One of the monkeys at the campground |
After
we dropped our things off in our rooms, we headed back to the van to spend a
few hours in the safari park before dark. The name of the park was Masai Mara.
When we all first drove in, there were a few zebras off to the side of the road
and we all started freaking out like it might be the only zebra we see. Later
we found out that there are actually thousands of zebras out there and we would
all eventually get tired of stopping for the zebras.
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| Zebra that we saw the first time out on safari |
We
kept driving and saw a few more animals that evening. We headed in just before
dark and got cleaned up before supper. We all had a really long day in the car
and were all pretty exhausted. The electricity at the camp is only on from 5:30
to 7:00 am and 6:30 to 10:00 pm. Since we would be in the dark anyway, we were
all in bed by 9:30.
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