Warthog Love

Third day at the camp. It’s surprisingly chilly in the morning when we head out for our first game drive at 06:30 a.m. Feels like no more than 15C/59F. But it certainly warms up as soon as the sun gains some height on the horizon. By lunch, it’s burning hot.

For today’s Mara breakfast, Robert parked our jeep in the shade of a lonely acacia tree and spread out the buffet on the hood. For about 30 minutes, we sipped hot Kenyan coffee, ate cheese/tomato sandwiches and cinnamon muffins all the while surrounded by grazing impalas, zebras and a few stray buffalo.

The rest of the day was evenly shared with the usual suspects: an elephant family with two calves, a few hundred mischievous baboons, a female leopard, forty or fifty hippos along the banks of the Mara River, three different lion prides and a group of sunbathing, humongous crocs. Not to forget that the camp’s resident warthogs welcomed us right outside our tent as we returned from the Hippo Bar this evening.

The four days in the Masai Mara have provided me with one of the most spectacular nature experiences of my life. As impressed as I was from the safari in Botswana a few years ago, the wildlife is noticeably more abundant here in Kenya. And I have some 75 gigabytes of footage and stills to prove it.