Bill & Jen's Millennium Adventure

Tuesday, December 21, 1999: Kichwa Tembo - Masai Mara
Up at 5 a.m., and surprisingly woke up easily with a wake-up call being someone outside of our tent saying "Sir? Sir?" We were up early for our balloon ride over the Mara.
Met Pete, an architect from Mexico City, a Dutch-Canadian couple who manage a lodge on Lake Victoria and a Richard Branson lookalike named Robin Batchelor. Our balloon pilot was a gentleman named Doug Mills from, of all places, Grand Rapids, Mich. (govscamp@africaonline.co.ke). He and his wife Karen have been spending half the year on the Mara for a decade, flying tourists around.
Sunrise from a balloon is Godlighting at its most extraordinary. The balloon flew low (an average of 50 feet), dodging trees and doing about 15 miles per hour across the Mara. Not many animals awake, but we did pass right over a family of elephants, including a couple of babies. It's a far smoother ride than the jeeps, and probably the best way to see all that is possible. In particular, looking at some of the native birds at eye level in their treetop perches was memorable.
Balloon Ride We had breakfast on the Mara at our landing site. Landing's a bit of a strong word, as we skidded across the plains for a good 300 yards before stopping sideways in the basket. "A controlled crash" is how our balloon pilot described it. Ours was smooth, as sometimes the balloon will hit a termite mound and fly back up in the air before crashing with a thud. Breakfast was standard American fare, except for three bottles of champagne that we were required to finish. I had my first tech discussion for the week, revolving around my Iridium pager, on loan (just in case) for the trip. We failed to settle, as a group, on whether technology was good or bad (great to stay in touch, but who the hell wants to get paged on safari?). Our driver met us at the landing site at around 8 a.m. to continue on the game drive.
We stopped by the mostly-dry Mara river to see a large group of really smelly hippos and crocodiles lounging around. Hippos are very territorial and very nasty (and pretty stinky too), but we were a good distance up on dry land watching them, so it was fairly safe. We also had a chance to see a cheetah and two cheetah cubs for a good half hour hunting an antelope. The cubs were adorable, rolling around, chasing each other and in general having a good time. Cheetahs tend to favor the termite mounds as perches for spotting game. Termite mounds, some easily five feet tall, dot the landscape of the Mara.
On the way back from the game drive, we stopped at a Masai village. Masai villages are ringed with thorn bushes to keep out the animals. The huts are windowless, stuffy structures made with available materials, which more often than not is cow dung. We paid US$10 per person for a tour of the village and a visit to one of the huts, which is sparse save for a small fireplace and dried leather hides suspended in the huts that serve as beds. Jen was a little creeped out to be sitting in a dung hut, but it was a slice of Africa, so to speak.
Waterbuck We had a late lunch at the camp and packed up for our 4 p.m. AirKenya flight back to Nairobi. A British-American couple, working for the U.N. in Somalia, were on our flight. One of their adult sons showed us how a gecko will actually make an excellent earring (they bite down hard enough to dangle from the earlobe). We saw our one and only lone wildebeest (the herd had migrated south the month before) on, of all places, the dirt runway at Kichwa Tembo. The driver had to chase the game off the runway to clear the way for the plane.
Charles met us at the airport, and we spent some time with Ivonne at her office at the U.N. compound for the United Nations Development Program before going home and catching up with David, fresh from London the previous day. That evening was dinner with the adults at the Carnivore, a legendary restaurant in Nairobi.
It works like this. You have a flag on your table that you keep up until such time as you're finished. In the meantime, waiters with large skewers of meat circulate around. They announce themselves by stabbing their skewer of meat from over your shoulder into the table and declaring "Zebra?" If you say yes, they carve off hunks of meat until you say Mercy. This is a restaurant I've dreamed about. I had crocodile, zebra, oryx and ostrich for about an hour until I could stand no more. It was all delicious (need to find zebra domestically). My only disappointment: no giraffe, which is supposed to be delicious.

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