Wednesday, 16 April 2014

16th - Lake Naivasha – Masai Mara

Today was a relatively uneventful day. We had a late departure from the lodge at 0900 which gave us a chance for a little extra sleep in the morning. I timed it so I had half an hour to have a walk around on the premises trying to get some shots of the local wildlife. The result was birds, zebras and a couple of waterbucks. But just walking around with the camera on my own shooting stuff was great in itself.

The drive was not as long as when leaving Samburu, but there was still quite a distance we had to travel. What made it worse was that at least the last third of the distance took most of the time as it was on gravel and poorly maintained roads. At 1630 we arrived at a Maasai village where we spent a couple of hours seeing them dance and being introduced to their daily village life. Their houses are very small (especially compared to Western standards) and apparently they move the village every nine years due to termites. It was timed in a way that when we visited we were able to see a few houses maybe 100m away starting being built as part of the new location of the village. We finished the visit with seeing the nearby school. It had 8 grades, 8 classrooms (with the size of one seen at home, if so large) and 650 students. Luckily we were there when they had left on vacation so we had more or less free reign at the school to see how it was.

After the visit we continued on to our lodge. No real roads, just tracks where other people had driven before. It took us almost half an hour to go not very far, but at 1830 we arrived safely at our new lodge.

Full day of game drive tomorrow, start at 0730!

Waterbuck.

Rueppell's glossy starling.

The lodges at Lake Naivasha.

Jumping Masai.

The inside of a Masai house. This is for a family of four. Just to the left from where I am taking this photo there is a room similar to what you can see in front to the left (bed room) and ahead to the right there is a small 1x1,5m room used for storage,

One of the class rooms. They were all this size.

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