After
an hour or so resting, we headed out for our first drive and met our Masai
guide James and Moses, a young intern who is here for a month.
Unfortunately we think we are “over-safari-ed”, there was nothing new to see
and it was hard to get excited about more of the same, plus James drove
terribly slowly so it was very, very hot.
The scenery is very much more open, rolling hills dotted with Acacia trees (and that is exactly what Mara means in Masai - spotted)
3 photos to show from a whole afternoon's drive - I think that shows our mood.
Back at camp we were met by an Askari who promptly tried to lead us in the opposite direction to our tent but again he didn’t speak English so it was difficult. Eventually someone else appeared and asked us which tent we were in – bearing in mind we are now the sole guests here and it is costing ££££ per night I feel they should know our tent so I was very cross – all we knew was there was a picture of a leopard carved on a log nearby but whether we were in Tent 6 or not we didn’t have a clue. When we finally got back to our tent it had been zipped up for the night so we had to fumble around and try and work out the best way in and also out to the adjacent loo tent in the night.
Both of us feel very dejected, it’s not the wonderful experience we have had thus far and so we’ve decided to give it one day and it we still aren’t happy with the place we’ll would try and get a plane back to Nairobi and find a nice hotel for a couple of days. This may seem an extreme reaction, but neither of us like the place and it reminds us of the “Tenko” experience we had in Thailand.
Changed for dinner we duly flashed for the Askari. As we were walking along the path to the main areas he suddenly shone his torch in the bushes and muttered “Hippo” and sure enough there was an enormous hippo about 10ft away from us. Hippo, despite their rather comical faces and huge, lumbering bodies, are in fact one of Africa’s most dangerous animals. They have a very quick turn of speed and more people are killed by hippo each year than elephant and lions combined. The Askari grabbed our torch off Ian, leaving us in pitch black, and just pushed us and we both stumbled into the bushes. We tried to ask him what we should do/go but without any English we didn’t have a clue so we hid behind a screen leading to another tent and just waited with our hearts pounding listening to a right commotion.
It sounds funny now but at the time……….. A different young (white) man then walked by and asked us how we were and we just let rip – poor chap!! When we finally got to the Mess Tent we were met by the Manager and we sat her down and explained our feelings to her. All credit to her, she acknowledged their poor performance to date and apologised. She explained that they didn’t know what time to expect us (we were only 5 mins after the ETA we’d been told – 11:30!) and they are required to employ a certain number of locals who didn’t even speak Swahili never mind English – fine but surely we should have been told what to do in a hippo event when we first arrived.
We decided that the tent view wasn’t worth the outside loo experience and Ian in particular feels he’ll be happier close to the centre buildings so we’ll move tents tomorrow (provided we decide to stay).
Having got all the problems off our chests we had a delicious dinner chatting to the Manager, Tania (ex employee/visitor) and Trai (Tracy as Ian correctly guessed) who is joining us on tomorrow morning’s game drive so I can get some photography tips from her.