| KENYA 99 |
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Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five
Kenyan Safari Part Three
(Pictures will be available once scanned)
Willy is not responsible for any misspelled or wrong names and claims the right to use poetic license. If anyone who was there feels offended or can remember the correct facts, feel free to email Willy and he'll decide whether or not to change it based on it's entertainment value.
From the desk of Willy B:
We drove out to the lodge at Maasai Mara and we soon found that we had come to the best place yet. We drove in and got our rooms which were tents built in a mini pavillion. They were quite nice and had a real bathroom sewn into the back of the tent. A few of the girls had gotten an interesting rash. We were getting a little leery of the local flora and fauna, especially after almost getting landed on by an highly poisonous snake.
We spent our first night there and I splept rather soundly. My tooth was acting up, I was in need of a root canal and I was really tired. After we had dropped off our luggage at the tent, we went out on an evening Safari. This is when we saw "The Snake". We were walking out to the vans and there he was on the wooden bridge. It was a Green Mamba and despite my infantile desire to mess with it, Peter wouldn't let me. Now, Green Mambas are a little like Black Mambas only Green Mambas are green and a Black Mamba isn't black. A Black Mamba is yellow, with a black mouth, sort of like a Cottonmouth only more like a coalmouth. Mambas are among the most poisonous snakes in the world. They are not; however, like other poisonous snakes. They are not content to merely shake their tails at your or puff up and hiss. Mambas are extremely aggressive towards other animals, no matter the size. Our green little friend had a lizard in his mouth, and so he seemed content to leave us to our screaming selves. We drove out to the Mara and saw many grazing animals but no lions. By this time we were all giving Gad a lot of harrassment about the lack of lions in his country. A few of the group were beginning to suggest the use of the most irritating group member as bait. This made me rather nervous. We saw a medium size group of elephants, including a baby elephant who regarded us with a shooing trunk. We never scanned so hard for a lion in our lives, until, of course, Peter's truck got stuck in the mud. We all got out and helped to unstick it, and that, was the hardest we ever looked for a lion in our lives. As we were clearing the hill to go home, we saw the most spectacular sunset of my entire life.
I think we took more pictures of that sky than any of the animals. The sky was huge. I cannot explain how the land spread out below us and the sky consumed the scene. It seemed that someone packed a few extra miles of ether between the bounds of the horizon. There was an incredible cloud formation that spread out horizontally, as though it were God's white anvil. As the sun went down through it, the anvil top expanded across the sky and the middle erupted red, black and orange. The Heavens' fire glowed from within as if the Divine Blacksmith's shaper had been consumed by the heart of his forge. A monstrous vertical column of Cumulo Nimbus Caesar Augustus Mambo(or something like that) as Bob identified it, slowly climbed along the right side of the formation. It held court above the entire sky scene, a white and royal scepter, flickering with internal lightning blasts, bearing witness to the lower of the stratified cloud mass. Bob was explaining the types of cloud formations, but I drifted off. The Earth's boundaries became undefined, causing the sky to appear as though it was a distant and fantastic oriental sea, bordered by surreal pink-orange pools and blue-white island cliffs that led my gaze, impossibly and Escher-like, into the indigo sky above me, shimmering with the twinkling stars and steady planets who had just arrived.
The pictures that we have of that sunset are so anti-climactic that I won't include them.
We made it back to the lodge under the cover of night and I was so tired by the time I got back, I passed out in the tent and was not to be seen until the next day. Beth has some interesting stories about that night though and I'll write what she saw later. I have to go do my taxes
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five
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