5-additional safari photos

Birds, Africa has beautiful birds too. Three photos of birds for you before we get to the four-footed varieties.

A breasted lilac is a stunning bird, slightly smaller than a crow. Whenever we would ask our driver guide, Dominic, what something was, his reply, "We call that a blah blah blah," giving us the name. These were beautiful birds.

Didn't even think about ostriches being in Africa, but they were roaming the Mara with the rest of the animals. Saw a solitary ostrich here or there, they on the last day there was a herd of them.

Stork, this is not the kind of stork that we say everywhere, but now I don't know the name. They too were residents at the tent camp. Set your shutter speed high and let the bird fly into the frame and you should capture a nice shot.

Turtles are not birds, I know that. I don't know how someone saw this guy but when we stopped to check him out he became mobile and wanting to crawl under the car for shade. Dominic quickly moved the car so that we wouldn't run him over.

Pumbaa the warthog, well not really, but warthogs, yes we saw many warthogs. They are ugly except when they're really young. Even then I'm not so sure they're cute. Regardless, this photo is a group of them (called a sounder of warthogs) on the rocks in the river.

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more animal photos for you.

We've already talked about the baboon. They aren't always camp residents, sometimes, actually most of the time, they are out in the wild hanging with the zebras.

Lisa says the eland is always an answer to a crossword puzzle question. Now she knows what they look like.

The Thompson gazelles are beautiful elegant animals. They scamper and scatter quickly just like the impalas.

Two photos of the giraffe for you. Graceful yet awkward animals. Watching a giraffe trying to get a drink or trying to plod through the water is amusing. They have to spread their feet after adjusting to make sure that they are stable. They bowing, well kind of bowing, they lean forward attempting to get that long neck down for a drink.

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You would think that water buffalo and hippo would qualify as part of the "big five" considering their size, but they do not.

The water buffalo just stood there and stared at us. He (or she) never moved. Two days later we saw a herd, a large herd of them. Ugly is what I say. Lisa says that they look like the girl with the braids on the cheese package.

Kenya experienced a year-long drought until a few months ago. And then of course Anna visits and it rains. The hippos have come out of the water to forage for food. Like the water buffalo, they are big and ugly. A separate blog post will give you more in-depth info about them.

The Impala and not by Chevrolet. A beautiful animal, elegant, sleek, very fast and graceful. I got lucky with this beautiful portrait of an impala looking back over his shoulder.

Wildebeast. Ugly and plentiful. They are everywhere you turn. Lisa finds them very attractive — not. When the plane was coming in for a landing you could see roving bands of moving black blobs. Wildebeasts. We saw a movement of them as they attempted a river crossing. Something forced them back and they piled up at the top of the bluff as some were facing one way and the rest the other way. We think we saw a crocodile on the riverbank which would have been the reason for the turnaround.

The zebra are also plentiful, but they are beautiful and graceful. Nervous nellies, braying like donkeys or kind of chattering to each other. The younger ones are browner than the older ones. They mingle with the wildebeast, gazelle, impala and kopi herds, yet standing out from the crowd with those striped PJs they are always wearing.

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The Big Five. That's what you want to see on Safari. Lion, leopard, cheetah, elephant and rhino. We saw four of the five. The leopard was elusive, pretty normal for a leopard. We went searching several times only to see what the leopard had dragged up the tree for dinner one night. Leopards hang out in trees and there was an impala carcass and skin mid-way up a tree next to a creek. That's as close as we got.

But the others, saw them all. Here they are. I think you can figure out which one is which.

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What you've been waiting for ... actual photos from the safari not just of our tent camp. The blogger software only lets me upload five photos at a time, so hang in there and you'll see many posts with animals.

This first photo is so funny to me even though our guide, Dominic, did not get the humor. You drive around the Mara and there are no directional signs, no landmarks that make any sense, no real roads, tire tracks from where the jeeps have cut through the landscape to go see an animal. Then you stumble upon a sign like this. I laughed so hard because it made no sense.

There is a gatehouse in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't look like it divides anything from anywhere else, but it must. Regardless, we were at the Talek gate most of the time.

The landscape varies depending on where you are in the Mara. You'll see photos of what looks like the Kansas plains stretching out to nowhere, or you'll see croppings of trees and rocks or creeks.

This is a termite hill which is about five or six feet tall. Folks duck behind these to take care of necessary business. 'nuff said.

At the camp they come to your tent in the morning with a pot of coffee or tea with some biscuits at the same time that they are saying "hello, this is your wake-up call." Yup, a live wake-up call, not a phone call from the front desk. The best time for viewing the animals is early-squirrelly and then mid-afternoon. Because you go out early, breakfast is served on the road. We ate around the hood of the jeep. It was a very substantial breakfast of a hard-boiled egg, sausage, toast, gobs of fruit, passion fruit juice and then coffee or tea. Lisa took this photo for my mother, it was such a Norma kind of shot.

5-safari camp residents

Sorry, could not get this posted last night, but it is the last of the safari camp photos.

The residents. Nope, not the human kind. There were about 10 guests, a bunch of staff (all male staff, never saw any females except for the guests), and then the animal kind of residents.

Baboons are noisier than monkeys on the roof. They screech like raccoons at night when they are chasing each other through the camp and then up the fig tree behind our tent. Then it rains figs down on the tent ceiling. There was a troop of baboons — about 30 or so hanging around. I think these might be Olive Baboons.

The first evening we were at the camp, there was a very low grumble growl. Everyone heard it at about 3 in the morning. We all thought that was it. Some predator had come for easy pickings regardless of the Masai with the spear. We talked about it at breakfast wondering if it was a leopard, a lion, don't know. Robin, the maitre de, said it was a velvet monkey. We have a hard time thinking that a monkey, of any size, could make that kind of noise. Mark, one of our safari mates, said he looked around his tent to see what he could use as a weapon. I didn't go that far, but said a prayer, must have been comforted because I then fell sound asleep.

Another visitor was the crocodile. Well, he stayed on the opposite bank of the Mara River, but he was always there.

A cow wandered in from a local Masai herd. The baboons scattered but then when they saw it was only a cow, they came back to hang out under the fig tree. The baboons scattered again when the tribesman came to check on his cow.

I'll post safari animals next but right now we're heading out on the Tube to see the London monkeys and baboons.

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Lisa enjoying a scrabble game on her iPod.

Anna with her MAC. Yes, I brought it with me so that I could download photos every night from my camera. We had electricity in the morning for about four hours, and then for about six hours in the evening. There were three electric lamps in the tent and then in the common bar area tent, there were two electric strips for recharging your camera batteries.

Lisa in the gift shop. Yup, a gift tent not a shop. A bit overpriced. If they cut the prices in half they could have made a mint. They took US Dollars and Kenyan Shillings. I didn't ask about British Sterlings (pounds and pence).

This is a Masai Tribesman. I don't believe this actual man guarded our tent at night, but some similar man did. They would stand out there with their spear, knife and stick, ready to take on the animals if necessary. Don't laugh. They kill one lion per year as a ceremonial right, and sometimes more if necessary. They do not go out and hunt just to kill, but kill if attacked. The Masai believe that all cows belong to them. So if a cow is stolen, they plan a raid, fight other tribes using arrows, maybe kill the men from the other tribe to get their cows back.

They wear red or bright orange because they say the color will keep the wild animals away from them. That is why you will see Masai out among all of the animals in the Mara, walking with their sheep, goats and cows, only carrying a stick, a spear and a knife.