Today and tomorrow involve lots of driving and a little bit of wildlife viewing. After a 7 AM departure we left the Masai Mara area and began a long slog over some “roads” that had more in common with riverbeds than land transportation routes. Seeing the Kenyan villages along the way was eye-opening, but just as in Tanzania people seem to be hugely upbeat for the most part.
In the midst of that long overland journey I was thinking about why I take these types of trips – journal readers notwithstanding, they don’t really provide value to anyone else, and it’s a lot of time and money for just a fleeting experience. However, there is something to be said for experiencing true wonder at the world we live in. I’m not a particularly religious guy, but I can still marvel at the miracle of creation and have a huge appreciation for the opportunity to explore even a small part of it. Additionally, as I stated to some fellow passengers at dinner tonight, visiting a place like Africa creates a sense of gratitude for things that, most of the time, the majority of us wouldn’t even notice. Seeing people manually lifting heavy culverts while repairing part of the insanely bad road, or carrying huge stacks of produce miles to market on the back of a bicycle, is a gigantic reminder that the infrastructure and opportunities back home were created for us by generations that came before and put in a lot of difficult work. There isn’t a Home Depot here, gas stations aren’t on every corner, school buses don’t bring kids to the schools that are available, safe drinking water isn’t piped into homes, etc, etc – all of those things are worth stopping to appreciate.
Moving on to the likely-more-interesting news of animal encounters, we arrived at Lake Nakuru National Park in time to do a few hours of game driving, had an up-close encounter with a massive Rothchild’s Giraffe that was a few feet from the vehicle, and spotted the first white rhinos of the trip – the second-largest land mammal walked right in front of our vehicle without giving us a second glance, all the while cameras were clicking away. Birds along the lake and some close-up encounters with baboons finished the day.
