Giraffe Snot

This has been a pretty fabulous weekend. Of course, no trip to Africa is complete without the requisite safari. We departed on Friday afternoon with a fourth companion, Jen - a Canadian (the French part) who is 15 months into a 2 year round the world trip. Part of me is incredibly jealous and part of me is exhausted by the thought of being constantly on the move and unstable for that long. But most of me is jealous. I'll get mine in bits and pieces, I guess. The exhausted part of me is probably the "I'm not 22 anymore" part that's ready to be a bit more of a grown up. But not entirely. Not just yet...

The safari was truly amazing. We saw everything we could have asked for - huge herds of elephants and even a little little baby less than a month old. Dozens of giraffes towering from as close as 20 feet away. Lions and lions. The first night it had rained before we arrived, and the cubs were playful. I have spectacular video of six cubs play fighting in a flowering tree. It doesn't get any more stunning than that. And we saw loads of other animals - hippos, a crocodile (huge and from really far away), jackals, hyenas wallowing in a mud hole, zebras, wildebeast kicking up their heels, all sorts of gazelles, exotic birds, dikdiks, mongooses (mongeese?), and crazy blue lizards with pink heads.

For two nights we stayed in a tented camp managed by the local Massais. It was quite nice - a platform tent with proper beds and a concrete structure bathroom at the back with shower and toilet. Rather nice by backpacker standards. And our hosts were delightful. The Massai are one of the minority tribes of Kenya but what most people think of when they think of traditional native Kenyans. They're nomadic herders, and each clan has hundreds of cattle, sheep, and goats. In this part of Kenya, it is very common to see extremely tall and thin men wrapped in brightly colored blankets herding animals with a long staff. These guys kept a fire going at camp all night with one sitting sentry aside a long spear usually used for defending the herd against big cats. It felt extremely safe and reassuring.

We visited the nearest village which is open to guests for a fee of about $12. The fee is supposedly distributed amongst all of the local villages and goes to support services such as the local primary school. I didn't take many pictures, because I don't like for this sort of thing to be a spectacle and to dehumanize people even though they're opening their village to us. But it was fascinating. The houses are short and squat mud structures with straw roofs and are build by the wives before marriage. There is a big termite problem (we've seen loads of the flying nasties), so they have to pick up and move the entire village about every 9 years. It's a polygamous society, and the chief's son who led our group told us his father has 4 wives and over 20 children - 7 of whom were born to this man's mother. The clan are all related descendants from one grandfather, so any of the men have to take wives from other villages. The first wife is arranged by the parents of the son, and if he chooses to take additional wives then he gets to pick those himself. The dowry is 10 cows, but that can be reduced if the man is particularly fit and able to jump extraordinarily high in a contest among his peers. The Massai men decided that Jimmy's jumping skills should drop Amanda's dowry to a mere 8 cows.

Speaking of cows - the landscape and wildlife in the Massai Mara is unforgiving, so special care must be given to the livestock. They are let out to graze during the day but return to the village at night so none are eaten by lions, cheetahs, or leopards. The entire perimeter of the village is walled off with thick interwoven tree branches, and there are corrals in the center made of tall tree branches where the goats are kept separate from the cattle that roam freely among the houses. Each small house in the village has a closet-sized room where the baby calves are kept and another internal room where the baby goats and sheep sleep. I image it's a cacophanous menagerie at night with hundreds and hundreds of livestock packed in with people, but probably becomes as much of the normal background as city street traffic to some of us.

We made our way back to Nairobi after an early morning game drive on Sunday, and on Monday visited the giraffe park. It's a non-profit breeding program to reintroduce the endangered Rothschild's giraffe to the wild. There is a feeding platform where you can give them bits of pelleted food which brings them right up face to face. They don't want to be pet, so the only way to get up close is if you have food. As one of the guides told some spanish visitors "No comidas, no amigo". Well, I got super up close and personal in a Ghostbusters sort of way when I was face to face with one of the adult females as she got a tickle in her nose. Literally 6 inches away, full face slobbery snotty blast that left my glasses looking like I'd been through a rainstorm. Ew. We were later told that giraffe slobber is highly antiseptic, so I'm hoping I got *some* good benefit from the experience that'll keep me extra healthy for the rest of the trip :)