it’s back to the camp for a late breakfast, nap, lunch, and another
nap or journal update before an afternoon drive that returns
after dark for dinner and bedtime.
It’s a simple life that brings you close to nature. The morning
is the time of birdsong and plains animals grazing, perhaps
grateful to have survived the night. Sunset is a moment of
tranquillity before carnivores set out on the evening hunt.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s line of “Nature, red in tooth and
claw” is proven true every day in the Maasai Mara. One morning
we see a cheetah emerge from hiding to bring down a young
impala then watch a pride of lions on a kill made overnight.
Most gruesome is a hyena kill. They hunt as a pack and begin
devouring their prey before it’s dead.
Despite the predation, the herbivores thrive. Most populous
are the wildebeest and there are more than a million of them
in the Great Migration. Mixed in with them are half a million
Thomson’s gazelles, a couple of hundred thousand zebras and
thousands of other gazelles.
The universal quest for first-time visitors to Africa is to see
the Big Five: lion, elephant, leopard, cape buffalo and black
rhinoceros, the most dangerous animals on the continent. Of
these, the rhino is the trickiest to find here because they have
been hunted to near extinction.wINTER ISSUE 2018 91Three adolescent male lions (top) keep watch; one of the luxurious tents
at Mara Plains Camp (above); sunrise over the Maasai Mara (opposite)
during an early morning game drive.