Lots o' Lions

Last month, to top off Mom and Carolyn's visit to Kenya, we visited Maasai Mara. "The Mara" is the top safari destination in Kenya and is right across the border from Tanzania's Serengeti National Park. The big event is the migration of wildebeast. During July the wildebeast cross into Kenya to find greener pastures and have to cross the Mara river. This scene is one of the archetypal wildlife scenes. Thousands, even millions of wildebeast cross over the river with crocodiles and lions looking on for an easy meal.
It takes about 4 hours to get from Nairobi to the park. We went with Steph's family and another MCC couple who works in Kenya. The six of us piled into a safari van, which is basically a conversion van with a pop-up top so you can view animals by standing up, looking over the top of the van. In our days at the park, we must have seen over 250 vans, basically identical other than the stickers advertising the safari company.
Two highlights from our trip were actually seeing the wildebeast cross the Mara and seeing over 30 lions. The lions are utterly unafraid (and uninterested) in humans. This means, you might see a pride laying on the road with 30 vans surrounding them, the lions completely ignoring the humans. The wildebeast are funny and stupid animals. They line up,thousands at a time at the brink of the river bank. They hem and haw for hours before one of them decides to plunge. There are many feints, with a few running to the edge and then turning around. This can get old, so while we waited alongside the river, we watched the hippos and ate lunch. Finally the wildebeast charged over. Unfortunately, there weren't any crocs around, but it was still really neat.
Overall, our second trip to the Maasai Mara was just as good as the first. Having good company always helps and you can't beat seeing thousands of zebras, wildebeast, not to mention lots of elephants, giraffe and hippos.