Right, part 2 then.
It would've been a bit of waste to go all the way to Kenya and not do a Safari in the Masai Mara, so the group who had come from England were organising a trip and I was going to tag along with them. The organisation of it seemed to be a little haphazard because everyone was so focused on the conference and the mission, and it seemed they had to change companies a few times so there was always a chance it would go a little pear-shaped. The rest of the story is where the TIA (This is Africa) comes in.
We had to go in two seperate groups due to different flight times etc. and I was with the first group leaving on the thursday. The plan was that we would leave where we were staying at 8am and drive straight to the Masai Mara, have an afternoon game drive through the park and then go to our accomodation to sleep and have another game drive early the next morning as the sun rose. I wasn't particularly fussed about facilities but the group had apparently booked a deluxe campsite with a perimeter fence, electricity etc. Unfortunately what actually happened was a little different.
The bus that came to pick us up was too small, so we spent a while jamming all the people and the luggage on there. Then we had to go to another town so that the driver could do some banking and find another minibus to take our luggage, which was crammed all around us. We stopped for other random pointless reasons along the way and ended up arriving at the Masai Mara after 9pm. In the pitch-dark and on fairly awful roads our drivers couldn't find our place and when we finally did find it, it was a little more basic than was expected. No electricity, relatively simple tents and no perimeter fence. To be honest, I loved it, cos the stars were amazing and instead of a fence we had Masai warrior guards, which was way cooler, and the tents were pretty spacious and we had actual beds in the tents. But, the rest of the group were not so enthusaistic at first and all stayed on the bus while a couple of the group went to work out why it was so different to what was booked (in the end it turned out that the person we had dealt with had passed on the booking to someone else and had "mis-communicated slightly). What happened then was really great. Everyone was cramped, tired and a little cold, and someone decided to start singing, and we spent the next little while singing hymns and songs and praying and sharing from the bible. It really lifted spirits and we settled down for the night after having a delicious dinner of spaghetti bolognaise.
The next morning we got to the gates of the park just before 7am for an early morning game drive and ended up spending 3 hours sitting in our buses outside the gates. It was another part of the "miscommunication" that our guides had been given enough money to pay for us as residents when in fact as tourists, the fee was more than triple. So the whole morning was spent trying to convince the park reps to help us out and then waiting for the tour company to wire money. It was all a bit of a mess, but worked out to be a bit of fun cos there were a few large local school groups waiting to go in who we got to hang out with and they were quite a laugh. We eventually got in and started driving around in our open-top bus. I won't take too long to describe the safari, cos the pictures (which I promise I will eventually post) will speak for themselves. It's pretty amazing to be so close to such amazing creatures and we saw some great stuff. We were 2 metres away from some sleeping lions who didn't seem too fussed to see us when they woke up. We saw (albeit from far away) hyenas trying to hunt some wilderbeast (and failing), and more that you'll see in the photos.
In the end, thank God, the whole trip worked out really well, despite the initial set-backs, and by the time we got back to Nairobi we were all a bit exhausted but very satisfied. Since a big group of us had to get to catch flights early the next morning we just stayed awake through the night, prayed a liturgy and packed the bus that would take us to the airport. I forgot to tell you that just on the last day of our trip, two of the group who were flying back to England had become quite sick and when we got back to the Coptic Centre they tested positive for malaria. By the morning when we were at the airport they were so weak from it all that we needed wheelchairs to push them through to the gates. It was kind of a bonus cos we could skip quite a few queues, but I guess they didn't see it that way. Thank God, I've heard back from them and they felt much better after a few days.
So that left me back in Zambia, very glad to be back to my quasi-home, but knowing full well that I had only 3 weeks. Well it's taken me two weeks to post this so now I have a week left and I really can't believe it's going so fast. I'm not going to reminisce just yet. I'll leave that for my next post.
God bless
No comments:
Post a Comment