Maasai Mara

Last weekend we went on our second group trip to Maasai Mara. Maasai Mara is basically the largest tourist destination in Kenya. It is a huge area of open lands half in Kenya and half in Tanzania where all of the safari animals are found. The Serengeti is the Tanzanian half and Maasai Mara is the Kenyan half. The main reason that I hadn’t been to the Mara yet was because it is such a tourist destination everything is tourist priced. I can honestly say that the place we stayed was one of the nicest places I’ve ever stayed in my life. It’s a resort called Tipilikwani. The “tents” (as they called them) were amazing and so was the food which was all included. This place was honeymoon quality good.
In Maasai Mara the only think there is to do is game drives. So in the span of two and days I went on five game drives. I saw ostrich, antelope, topei, dik dik, hyenas, jackals, giraffe, zebra, elephants, aardvark, Thompson gazelle, warthogs, spring hare, buffalo, wildebeest, hippos, crocodiles, lions, and a leopard! It was amazing and seeing the leopard and lions was probably the most exciting. Another cool thing about leopards is that they climb trees so although we never saw a leopard in a tree twice we saw dead antelope that it had dragged up. We saw so many lions in Maasai Mara and drove up to within 10 feet of them. One time we saw a pride so there were about 13 of them just lounging about napping.
Along with seeing all of the animals it was cool just to be in a space that was so open. You could see the sky meeting the horizon with only one or two trees in sight. One night it was raining miles away and we could see it. We could see the rain from miles off! I thought that was so cool. When we were on the game drives we were in four-wheel vehicles where the top popped off. Standing up in the car looking out of the roof speeding along with nothing in between me and the Mara was a great feeling. The best experience though was defiantly when we went on the night drive. The roof was completely off the vehicle so I stood on the seats and sat on the roof. There was a bar behind me that I held on to as we went whipping around. The rain had passed so you could see a sky full of stars. Between the speeding car, air rushing around me, open sky, and empty horizon it’s hard to even put into words how I felt. The best I can do is to say it was liberating.
Another great part about Maasai Mara was my tour guide Joseph. Joseph (and the other two tour guides) are all Maasai and were decked out in full Maasai style. I rode in the front seat of the car for almost the whole weekend so me and Joseph bonded. It’s really hard to offend people here, and almost no questions are off limits so I more or less interrogated Joseph. It was good because I learned all about Joseph’s life and Maasai culture. Maasai life is actually very similar to Samburu’s which we experienced on our Turkana trip.
Maasai usually get married when the girl is 14 and the guy is 15-18. Joseph was 24 his wife was 22 and they had a 7 year-old daughter and a 3 year-old son. Men and women are both circumcised. Women when they are 12. I asked Joseph if he thought this process would stop anytime soon and he said maybe in 50 years. The interesting thing about the tradition of circumcising women is that it is perpetuated by women. One Samburu man we spoke to on the Turkana trip said that he wanted an uncircumcised wife. He also said that if he brought an uncircumcised wife back to his village they would have to be together all the time or else the older women would take her and forcibly circumcise her when he was gone. I think female circumcision has turned into more of a “we had to do it, now you do too” kind of deal. Anyways, interesting stuff.
The most important thing in a Maasai life is cows. They are nomadic and cows are currency. Joseph said he paid nine cows, two goats, and one sheep for his wife. He said nine cows is the standard and within those nine there are requirements like one must be pure white etc. One thing that was really cool about Joseph and one of the other guys was that they had been all over the world. They had both been to Europe, the States, and Canada. I asked Joseph how he got a visa, because getting a visa to the States is really hard. He said that it’s easier for Maasai to get visas because they always return to Kenya. I thought that was interesting. I look forward to seeing someone walking around in full Maasai finery in the U.S.