The Maasai Mara—God’s Country. This can be said about a lot of places in East Africa, but this tops the list. There really is no other way to describe it. Vast plains, an endless sea. Open sky. Rolling, undulating. A silence settles over the grassland that is peaceful, dream like. It had just rained, so the Mara was a magnificent green. Lush. George Schaller said “you can see the entire landscape between an ostrich’s legs.”
One morning, we were fortunate to see a mother cheetah and two cubs. Little, fuzzy cheetahs, they make your heart melt. They lied on mom, licked her, nuzzled. Cheetahs have incredible markings—their spots of course, but they also have black tear drops that run from the inside part of their eyes, down to the edge of their mouth. Magnificent.
One evening we came upon six male lions. One male was enormous, his mane was dark and it was as if he could barely life his head it was so big. We watched them in the evening dusk as they played. They jumped on each other, rolled around, swatted each other. They scratched the tree like a scratching post and rubbed their cheeks and back on it. The next morning we saw two female lions eating a buffalo. Watching a lion eat is amazing. This lion’s face was covered in blood; he was yanking at the leg with his teeth trying to break it off like a wish bone. At one point, half of his body was inside the buffalo carcass and he gnawed at the meet inside. Awesome. Oh right, then the elephants that crossed the river, the crocodiles, the hippos cruising down the river bank into the water, the giraffe, mongoose, eland, impalas…God’s Country.
