10 August -- Masai Mara to Mombassa (by Roger)

Good day, especially for a travel day today.

Got up at a leisurely time (for us on this trip) and had our first breakfast without Caroline and Linda here. We talked about them being on a plane for Amsterdam as we were sitting there with our fruit juice and omelets. What a great time we had; we were both missing them.

Since we had to pack to get out of our room before we headed into the park, we ran a bit late and were sitting at breakfast when Naomi came up. Poor thing – first thing she said was that she hadn’t slept all night because of all the animal sounds. She was right…I’d waked up in the middle of the night, too, to the sound of an animal screaming for its life, each scream cut off with a cluck. Strange. Rollex later told us that two leopards had been in the compound during the night and that they’d had to turn off the electric fence for them to get out; they were seen leaving this morning. What we’d heard was the baboons sounding a leopard warning, like we’d heard in Nakuru with a Vervet Monkey. Oooh Kayyy. I told him not to tell Naomi and to tell her driver not to tell her either. She seemed like she was worrying enough as it was.

After we got started, we had a really nice game drive during the rest of the morning. Of course, there was the usual insane number of wildebeest and zebra in the migrating herds, but this time with numbers of topi mixed in. I really like those animals – their patches of blue, their smooth hides. They have weird faces, though: like wildebeests with their eyes in the wrong places. We also saw a couple of herds of elephants and a couple of kills that were being cleaned up by the nasty-dispositioned vultures. There was also a somewhat large pride of lions that was quite active. We stopped to watch one drinking from a pool while the others walked along behind. Not far away, we saw one lone female sitting beside a fresh kill, probably the kill that the pride had eaten on before heading for the shade by the water. This female was reluctant to leave the kill to the scavengers, but she was getting hot in the sun and panting a lot. We watched here for a little while and headed off ourselves. Two lion sightings in the space of thirty minutes – pretty good!

We continued to drive though herds of animals, identifying various new birds and loving the open, tan landscape. It was amazing to see the difference in the grasslands where the animals had already passed. In the areas just being reached by the migration, the grass was somewhat dry and knee-high; in the areas already grazed by the herds, the grass was mowed short, as if by a tractor mower. In one of those mowed areas, we spotted a Sand Grouse and laughed at its odd call.

Our last big sighting of the day was of a Secretary Bird. These are mostly terrestrial, mostly white birds that are about 3’ – 4’ tall. They have a few loose feathers flopping around on their heads (like secretaries with quills), and they have long, thin legs that make the birds look like they’re wearing knickers. They hunt by taking long strides around the grasslands, and when they think they’ve found something, they strike at it with one long leg at a time while pecking at it with strong beaks. They primarily eat snakes, an animal I’m more and more wary of here in the Mara. We’ve seen more than one dead animal here that wasn’t killed by a predator, and Rollex says most of them have been killed by snakes. Anyway, the Secretary Bird was striding around the area with its mate in the distance, oblivious to our vehicle following it. We didn’t see it catch any snakes, but that was OK with me. I really like these birds, and I was happy just to see one so well.

We headed back to Siana Springs camp after this sighting to have lunch, shower and wait for the plane. I also had a pretty good nap. A huge group of American tourists had arrived, too, and we could see the camp gearing up for this new group.

About 4 pm, the plane landed for us. We tossed our bags in the back, and the plane took off for Nairobi. I like these little planes a lot. Instead of six or seven hours on a bumpy (you can’t imagine how bumpy), dusty (you can’t imagine how dusty) road, we had a nice, 45-minute flight to Nairobi. Joseph, the Let’s Go Travel driver who always meets us, was there to meet us again and, to my surprise, we still had time to make the train to Mombassa! This was good news as we didn’t want to waste a day here when we could be seeing something different. It was nice to get a short note from Linda and Caroline, too.

We got to the station with time to spare, got our bed assignments, and got on the train. I then found the kitchen steward and got passes for the first sitting for dinner. Let’s Go advised us to do that as we might be eating quite late otherwise.

The train departed promptly at 7 pm, much to my surprise. Unfortunately, our car had no electrical power, and the wagon steward gave us a battery-operated emergency light to put in a holder over our compartment. The light was pretty inadequate (you couldn’t read by it), but it was better than what we had a couple of hours later when it went out completely. No light for the entire car for the entire trip. I guess we were lucky, though, that we didn’t have a couple of infants (like the people up from us) and that our light lasted more than the 30 minutes that most people’s lights lasted.

When we went to the dining car for dinner, we shared a dinner table with a couple living in France. The woman was a former Kenyan who’d married the French guy, and the two had moved to France about three years ago after several years of living in Mombassa. They live in Versailles now. They were great company, and we spent our time talking about France, Mombassa, and the Kenyan Coast. We also got some great advice from them about what to visit while we were on the coast, advice we followed when planned out the rest of our trip. Eventually, the kitchen crew sounded the dinner-ended bell, actually a short theme on a three-gonged instrument, and we headed back into the darkness of our car. Our light had about twenty minutes of power left at that point; the French couple’s had already gone out.

It was somewhat hard to get around the car in the dark with the train moving. You couldn’t find the bathroom, and when you did find it, you couldn’t see anything in it. Then you couldn’t find your way back to the cabin. One very different thing, though, was to be going through a countryside totally devoid of artificial light. As we rolled through the night, you could see only stars and darkness with a very occasional fire. It was beautiful.

I slept pretty well, rocked by the motion of the train and occasionally wakened by a jerk as we stopped and then restarted our trip to Mombassa.