Visiting the Maasai Mara National Reserve

We drove from Lake Naivasha to the Maasai Mara National Reserve via a town called Narok, the roads were pretty good and we got to the park in the early afternoon.

En route we visited a Maasai enkang (village) just outside the park, the local men were dressed in their traditional Maasai Shuka’s, Kanga’s and beaded jewellery and head ware. The head of the village talked to us about life in the enkang and then we were welcomed by the men with a Maasai welcome dance, where jumping as high as you con shows off your prowess in the tribe. Then the ladies of the village came out dancing and singing in a line and took our hands one by one and led us all, dancing, into the enkang.

The women are responsible for building the huts, caring for the children, collecting water every day and cooking. The men build the fences and walls round the enkang and tend the cattle, sheep and goats on the land.

We were shown round the mud huts and told how they were built, by using sticks as the main structure, with grasses, mud and cow dung to make the walls, the roof was made with sticks and grass, but there is also tarpaulin used to add to the waterproofing. Inside was very dark, with only a few windows. There was a room to keep the young animals in at night then a main living area with a ire for cooking in the centre, at each side there was a bedroom, one for mothers to sleep with the girl children and one for the men to sleep with the boy children. Once a child hits 13 years old, they go and stay with their grandparents.

We entered the Maasai Mara through the Sekenani gate at the North/West, called the Sekenani sector of the park. As soon as we were in the park we saw herds of Wildebeest and Zebra, the migration had already started, where they travel to the Mara from the Serengeti and would continue to do so for a couple of weeks. The weather had clouded over a bit, but this made for a very atmospheric start to our two days of game drives. The Maasai Mara is 1510 square kilometres and sits right up against the border between Kenya and Tanzania and is an extension of the even larger Serengeti in Tanzania.

There were maybe another 15 safari vehicles that we saw, you could always tell when one of them had spotted an animal as they would gather round it. There was supposed to be a limit of 5 vehicles viewing an animal at once, this was stretched a little, but when another vehicle showed up, the first there moved away. You weren’t allowed to get too close to the animals or harass them. There was a main grit road through the park and a few side roads, but going “off road” wasn’t allowed and the driver would get a hefty fine if caught doing so.

We saw two lionesses lazing in the grass beside some rocks and bushes, then we noticed a wildebeest caracas hidden in the bushes. We watched for a while and one of the lionesses headed to the buses and started eating the wildebeest, we could see her pulling at the caracas and ripping it apart, we were so close you could hear her chewing. We saw a number of vultures soaring overhead, sitting in trees and some scavenging off the caracas of a wildebeest.

We stopped to watch a couple of elephant herds wander past, they were a couple of hundred meters away from the road, we saw a few ostrich pairs and lots of giraffes eating feeding on the Acacia trees, we saw quite a few young giraffes. There were lots of gazelle, antelope and a few Topi.

We stayed in the Aruba Mara Camp for a couple of nights, it was a nice camp at the Talek gate. On our last morning game drive we didn’t see much as it was raining, but once the rain stopped we saw two lionesses relaxing while their two cubs played together in a small clearing amongst the bushes.