2017/09 Part 5 Masai Mara - Fri pm Mara Upstream |
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We told Nzuki about all our days in Tanzania and the amazing dramas we’d seen, like the 
lions and the buffalo, and the lions and the crocodile, plus the rhinos and the leopards. I think he was wondering how he was going to keep our 
good luck going.
“Mara” means spotted and that it is: a golden plain covered with spots of trees and shrubs. There are also hills and ridges covered in forest, and of course the famous Mara River winding through the park. 
Nzuki took us upstream along the river. The river is supposed to be full of hippos and crocodiles and it certainly seemed that way as we saw them both at most viewpoints. The Nile crocodile is a splendid animal, but best viewed at a distance.
The Mara is the river that the wildebeest cross during their great migration to and from the Serengeti and its steep banks guarantee that there will be injured animals, easy prey for the crocodiles. There didn’t seem to be any wildebeest or zebra around the river at this time though. The Mara seemed quiet after the Serengeti; perhaps the herds had already migrated?
But there were still new animals to be seen, particularly birds. Nzuki pointed “Bee eaters!” Sandie thought they were cute; I couldn’t see them at all. My brain was looking for Australia’s rainbow bee eaters, much larger birds and it was a long time before it accepted these little guys. They are called “little bee 
eaters” and yes they are cute.
We’d already seen plenty of buffalo on this trip, but this was the first to 
face us down. It seemed to be pondering whether to charge and knock us over. It has happened before to others but not this time.
We had some close-ups of magnificent topi, the antelopes we’d seen in the Serengeti.
There were also plenty of elephants about, including 
some adorable little ones.
We saw a hyena on the prowl, always a chilling sight, more sinister somehow than the lions. 
Then we had a sequence of birds, a black-headed heron, and an 
Egyptian goose, and some lilac-breasted rollers. We’d seen these in the Serengeti but this time we could really see their strange lilac colour.
A troop of baboons entertained us as they moved across the landscape and we found yet another kind of plover, the spur-winged plover.
The antelopes with the splendid horns are elands. We’d seen elands before on this trip but never close enough to note their odd knee patches.
The yellow bird has two names, the parasitic weaver and the cuckoo finch, clues 
that the bird has a habit of laying eggs in another weaver bird’s nest. It doesn’t make cuckoo-like noises though.
We found another hyena, this one snuggled down contentedly 
in its nest. Perhaps we spent too much time looking as its expression changed to a frown of irritation.
We found more birds: a black-bellied bustard, what we think is a white-browed coucal, and a spurfowl.
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We were quite happy with how much we’d seen but Nzuki was determined to find more for us. Unlike the other parks we’d visited, the Mara allows off-road driving in the low traffic areas away from the river, and Nzuki was taking us between trees and through gullies.
Finally he hit the jackpot, a pride of lions. The light had almost gone, but the lions were still enough for some of our pictures to come out.
Yes, it was a beautiful sunset. Of course, we arrived back at the lodge too late to look around outside. It had been a long day, starting with breakfast in the Serengeti. Our personal migration to the Mara had been longer but faster than the wildebeests’.
It was tough to stay awake long enough to download the day’s pictures. Outside we could hear odd growling noises, but not lions, something different.