Leaving the Mara

Today began at 6:30 again with our game drive. It was a beautiful morning to be out on the savanna! The sun came up just as we got started and the sky was so clear!

Sunrise as we began our last game drive

There has seemed to be a different theme & tone to each of the game drives, based on the animals that we find & the traffic/road conditions we experience during our 2+ hours on the savanna. This morning there were very few other people we encountered, which made for very pleasant driving. Today, the theme seemed to be hippos & ostriches. It seemed wherever we drove, there they were – and the hippos were out in the grasses, not totally submerged in the water! We even had a hippo run alongside of the car for a short while!!

One of the hippos we ran across moving his way to nearby water.
Our first ostrich sighting 🙂

We also saw several animals we’d seen before, including a pair of lion brothers, and we also saw baboons which we hadn’t seen before! Here are some views of my last hours in Masai Mara.

The pair of lion brothers. The other one is peeking out from the grass.
On the way to the airstrip we came upon a group of baboons! I had been warned not to keep my balcony door open because of the baboons, but I never saw any at all until this morning.
Baboons with their young on their backs. They carry their young like this for the baby’s first year of life.
Silver backed jackal pups playing on the road.
I love this image of the elephant and the Balanite tree.
The view from my table in the dining room at the lodge. The tree has nests of the Black masked weaver bird all over it. I so enjoyed watching those bright yellow & black birds working on their nests!

We had only a short distance to drive to the airstrip from the lodge. I was comforted to see that the airstrip was dry today – no mud to deal with during take-off 😊

My plane bound for Nairobi. It was about an hour flight.

Once I landed in Nairobi, my focus shifted to preparations for our journey to Moheto tomorrow to begin our training mission. Pastor Ken from the Moheto UMC came into Nairobi this afternoon to join us. David & I enjoyed meeting him & having dinner together with him tonight. Pastor Ken & I are both staying at the Methodist Guest House in Nairobi tonight. Tomorrow morning David will join us again and we all will head off toward Moheto at 7am. Steve will leave Julia’s River Camp in the Masai Mara tomorrow morning and meet up with us in the town of Narok along the way.

I’m excited to begin this next part of my Kenyan experience as our team spends the next 9 days in Moheto in the western part of Kenya and gets to know the people in Pastor Ken’s church!!

6 thoughts on “Leaving the Mara

  1. This is wonderful Barb. Thank you so much for the gift of this blog.
    Those three baboons are perfect for a “See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil” poster. 🙂
    Looking forward to the next amazing part of the experience. prayers. hugs. travelling mercies.

    Like

  2. you had such amazing animal sightings. Were you just using your cell phone camera or took a real camera? That pic with the elephant and the tree is beautiful, but is there something stalking it in the grass? (i feel like i see a crouching lion). i’m totally amazed by all that you saw, it’s like you’re IN a zoo!!! We will most definitely hope to be so lucky when we are able to go there ourselves one day!

    Like

    1. All the photos that I post are with my i- phone, since I have no way to get photos off of my camera until I get home to my computer. Yes, there is a hyena crossing between us & the elephant that we all noticed after I recorded the photos. I totally forgot it was there. Thanks for the reminder 🙂

      Like

  3. Thinking of you as you travel to Moheto. The love you receive from the people there and the love you give will change your lives forever. God bless you on this journey.

    Like

Leave a reply to Pastor Grace Cancel reply

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started