Cody's musings on the mara (finally!)

This blog entry might not be as good or I might be better then the other ones I’ve done before, because I can’t remember all the things that happened on my safari but I’ll try.

We had to wake up really early that morning and I didn’t like it at all. But the good part was that we didn’t have to walk anywhere to get to our ride, because it was literally right outside of our door. I took 2 steps before I got in the car it was that close. I can’t remember most of the drive but apparently it took like 11 or something hours to get there but it only felt like 2. When we got to the front gate of the Mara, there were these Masais that wanted to sell us stuff. I bought something and I thought they would leave us alone, but they kept trying to sell us stuff. I was thinking “Dude, how much little masks do you think we’re gonna buy?” but I never said anything like that. But before I knew it we were on our way again. When we arrived at the Fig Tree resort, I was so shocked that there was a place like this in Africa. Because from what I saw before, nothing compared to this place, money wise of course. It was really fancy, but one thing that bugged me about it was that whenever we ate our meals, there was only one African eating, everyone else was white, and that African was Jeremiah, our guide. I thought that was pretty racist. Oh yea, forgot to mention that we saw a bunch of animals before we even went out on our game drives. We saw a heard of giraffes (or whatever you call a group of giraffes) crossing the road right in front of us. It was pretty crazy. We also saw many antelope on the way.


The next morning, we had to get up really early again, but this time it didn’t bug me because I was so excited to go out on the drive. I got up, had some tea and maybe I had a little snack too but I can’t remember, and then we went in the van. Ok, for this part, I can’t remember what days we saw what animals, so I’ll just describe some of the things I saw. The first thing I loved about the drive was that it was so flat and there was a random tree every mile or so. It was like it was right out of The Lion King. One thing that I loved the most was the warthogs. Now when you think of warthogs, you probably think of nasty pigs but grey right? But the warthogs were so amazing and surprisingly clean, except for the ones in the mud, cooling off. But warthogs are extremely stupid, because they will forget why they’re running. For example, if they were being chased by a lion, they would run really fast for a bit, but then they’ll just stop and be like “Wait, why are we running?” And they would be eaten. That’s why they call them “Lion Sausages.” I saw them doing this first hand. There would be a couple warthogs on the road, and we would drive up and they would, obviously run away. But then they would just stop. They wouldn’t slow down at all, they would be running, and then they would be stopped. It was pretty hilarious. Another thing that was for sure a “once in a life time” type of thing was the cheetah. Now we didn’t only see a cheetah, we saw a cheetah hunting a gazelle. It was amazing; it stalked up to a gazelle and got only like 40m away. Then the gazelle spotted him and ran for its life. The cheetah ran after the gazelle, but cheetahs give up after a short amount of time. They only run for about 100m, then they quite, so the gazelle got away. But another thing with cheetahs, is that they remember that gazelle. If it goes on with a pack, the cheetah will only go after that one gazelle; it will leave the others alone.