16/10/2023
Adriana’s Awesome African Adventures
Six o’clock in the morning came early especially when we went to bed at three in the morning after a long flight. No complaints though, as adventures awaited! The first stop on the itinerary was Lake Nakuru located in Kenya on the floor of Great Rift Valley. Lake Nakuru is most famous for the colonies of flamingos numbering more than a million. Besides flamingos there are over 50 mammal species at Lake Nakuru, and Lake Nakuru National Park. We saw white rhinos, Cape buffalo, zebra, the Rothschild's giraffe, eland, and waterbuck.
Maasai Mara, Kenya, the next destination on our itinerary
"May the Creator give us cattle and children”, is a Maasai prayer. Cattle and children are the most important things to the Maasai people. The Maasai of East Africa live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania with a population of approximately one-half million people. Maasai men marry multiple wives. The whole family lives in Kraals arranged in a circular fashion. Each wife has a house that she builds herself. The house is made of mud, sticks, grass, cow dung, and cow urine. There is a fence around the Kraal made of acacia thorns to prevent lions from entering.
The Maasai have deeply rooted traditions and customs. Both Maasai men and women undergo circumcision as soon as they reach puberty to mark their passage into adulthood. Women will undergo the barbaric practice of ge***al mutilation, the removal of the cl****is, and sometimes of the outer l***a. Men also have a tooth removed, which is considered a sign of beauty. All of this will be done without anesthetic or painkillers. Girls will marry shortly after and neither girl nor boy will have a choice on whom they marry. This is arranged between their parents.
The Maasai are some of the tallest people on the planet. The average height of a Maasai is believed to be 190.5 cm / 6.25 feet. They are also famous for jumping acts. The higher a Maasai jumps, the more eligible he is to marry. The Maasai rely on meat to eat and drink milk and blood from cattle for protein and caloric needs.
The Maasai people have no funeral ceremonies for the dead, as they believe that burying the dead body is bad for the soil. Instead, they smear the dead body with animal blood or fat and dump it in the bushes for predators to scavenge.
The village we visited was formed of one family: one man, eight wives, and thirty-eight children. The Maasai welcomed us with their traditional dance, showed us the inside of one of the houses (dark, small, and smelly), and showed us how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. A few houses had small solar panels and we were told that some Maasai had cell phones. Women smiled, children played, and men proudly explained their customs and traditions.
Animals we saw in Maasai Mara
It has distinctive jagged, irregular leaf-like blotches that extend from the hooves to its head.
African elephants are intelligent and socially complex animals. They are the largest land animals on Earth. They can be up to 7.5m long, 3.3m high, and can weigh 6 tons
Next, we drove by private car into Tanzania. At the border crossing a giraffe crossed the road right in front of us
We spent several days of safari in the Serengeti and Ngorongoro crater. There we encountered more lions, including one that had just caught a zebra and was guarding it closely.
We came across an elephant that had died and was devoured by vultures.
The Life and Death of an Elephant
Elephants are one of the most amazing animals in the world. They live in family structures and are dependent on each other for survival. Elephants show empathy towards each other, comforting those who are injured or grieving. They are intelligent and social.
Elephants understand death. When an elephant dies, the other elephants in the herd gather around the body and mourn the loss of their herd member. They touch the body with their trunks or legs and make sounds. This mourning behavior can last for several hours or even days. Once the mourning period is over, the elephants in the herd will move on, leaving the body behind for the scavengers. First on the scene will be the hyenas who can cut into the elephant’s thick skin with their sharp teeth. Then the vultures will come who will feed on the flesh and organs.
Elephants visit gravesites even years later to pay their respect. They touch the bones with their trunks or sniff the area where the body was once. This is how the elephants pay their respects to their deceased.
The elephants experience joy, grief, love, and compassion.
One morning I woke up saying to myself: “Today I am going to see a lion mama and her cubs." Not even five minutes after we left the camp, I saw her. And then, across the road, I saw two little ears in the grass. There it was, her cub. And then a second one, and a third one, and a fourth one. One lioness mama and her four cubs. One cub got bold and started to cross the road to join her mom but decided instead to hide under the safari jeep where she found shade. The second one joined, and the third and the fourth. Four cute lion cubs sitting under the car. Unlimited dose of cuteness!
Leopards
When a leopard catches its prey, it takes it up on a tree so that the hyenas will not get to it.
We were told that it is very difficult to see a leopard so I considered myself lucky to see this one proudly displaying his most recent catch. We admired him at length knowing that we would not get another chance to see a leopard again. We left, and just five minutes up the road, there he was, waiting patiently for us, as if to say: "I’ve been waiting for you, here I am." Then, he looked me straight in the eyes, posed beautifully for his portrait, then got up, said goodbye, and slowly walked into the sunset.
The Chase
The female lion found cover between two parked safari jeeps. She studied the scene in front of her: a herd of gazelles grazing quietly unaware of the imminent danger. One of them would be her next meal. She emerged cautiously from her hiding place and lowered herself in the grasses. She lifted her head, looked, lowered her head, and crawled, inches at a time. This took about 15-20 minutes. Eventually, one of the gazelles sensed the danger followed by the rest of the gazelles soon after. Suddenly they all stood still ready to flee at a moment’s notice. The lioness stood up, eyed the group of gazelles, made a quick calculation (speed and distance), and realized that she did not stand a chance. She turned around and walked back. Not now, not this time. The hunt was over!
We also saw baboons, including about 25-30 of them who aggressively jumped on top of our camp, the blue monkey, hammer bird, and the biggest snake I ever saw: a boa constrictor.
ZANZIBAR is an island off the coast of East Africa that belongs to Tanzania. It is a beautiful island with an ugly past. This ugliness is called slavery. Zanzibar was for a long time a hub of slave trade in the Indian Ocean. The slave trade was conducted by the Omani merchants who came to the island to trade in ivory and clover but found the selling of human beings a lot more lucrative. The African slaves were captured by other Africans through wars in central East Africa where ethnic groups were fighting against each other. The Omanis built a slave market in Stone Town, Zanzibar, that quickly became the center for buying and selling human beings. Thousands of slaves were brought in caravans on a journey that lasted many days. The captured walked in chains without food or water and many perished on the way due to hunger, exhaustion, and illness. It is not known how many African slaves were captured and sold and how many died.
When slaves arrived in Stone Town they were placed in a small underground chamber with very little light. Then they were prepared and exhibited sometimes whipped in public to determine how “strong” they were.
In 1909 slavery was abolished from the island of Zanzibar. The British colonial rulers erected a church on the site of the former slave market in Stone Town and there is also a museum and a memorial nearby. The memorial represents five cast concrete figures, all but one of which are chained around the neck.
Zanzibar is an idyllic island with beautiful sandy beaches and aquamarine waters.
The End of an Awesome Adventure