TL&DR

Kenya is pretty damn cool. There are lots of warm people, and the game reserves can be glorious. You can also find yourself getting utterly shafted.

Introduction

My girlfriend had a Kenyan college buddy, who had friends from his past who operate a camp in the Masai Mara. The great migration is pretty significant by any wildlife standards, so rather than opting for home (South Africa), we thought we would take a chance on Kenya and the Masai Mara in particular.

The Masai Mara has a top notch national park, and a host of conservancies. These conservancies are basically land collectives, where land holders pool their land and charge visitors a fixed daily fee for exploring their land and eyeballing the animals on their collectively land.

We flew into Nairobi, stayed the night there, and the following day transferred to Wilson airport to fly to the Masai Mara with Mombasa Air Safari. This was an adventure in itself as the Uber drive we hailed effectively called me a clueless prat and insisted this airline did not exist. He then drove me to an office park, which was clearly distinct from the Wilson airport departures pin. My spider sense was waxing, so I accused our Uber drive of operating in bad faith, when it turns out, he was entirely correct and the office park was exactly the right place to check in.My bad, the cringe is hard. He did make up some bullshit excuse about how entering the office park would incur a fee and insisted on watching me tip him the fee and additional tip, and of course my Uber recipe showed the fee as a discrete line item, so he was scaly but not completely scummy. So it goes.

Once checked in, we went through the worlds smallest security/departure lounge, and boarded a single engine prop plane. The flight to the Masai Mara was glorious, and is an easy recommendation at only ~$200 per person.

We land at 10:40am. On arrival, we wait 10 min, our guide arrives and we are loaded into a jeep and headed towards our camp. We passed a Masai village, and were told we could visit it for the low low fee of $30/pp. 10 min later, we found ourselves waiting at a boom to enter the Lemek conservancy our camp (Losokwan) was on. This felt a little odd, as other jeeps drove past us and straight in. Why were we burning close to thirty min in a jeep with 6 people and all of our baggage. Our guide seemed cool, but there was clearly something cutting, and dragging anchor. Eventually, we get the green light and the boom is raised for us. We drive for all of 5 minutes and suddenly our way is blocked by a belligerent wanker on a green bike, who was promptly joined by more belligerent wankers, one of which dual wielding clubs. Very impressive. I don’t grok Masai, but I do grok passage blocking, stick shaking, and fuck off hand gestures. Our guide turns the vehicle around, and starts to leave the way we came. He suggests we visit that very same village we passed earlier! Ah, the optional addon just became the only game in town, who could have anticipated such an occurrence. (Never mention anything in a story which is not relevant to the later development of the story). So we go to this village. One jacked Masai dude comes out, issues a welcome (Hello) and promptly demands his $180. Super cool. So we pay our money, a group of 7 people emerge from this village inside of 5 minutes chanting and singing, continue singing for a whopping 9 minutes. During this period we are encouraged to participate, and I find myself briefly jumping up and down on cow shit for a couple minutes and mercilessly mocked for my poor jumping ability. (I am well wed to the earths gravitational well). We get to peek inside a traditional Masai house, a layered stick frame packed with mud, and then we are shown the door by way of the gift shop. I shit you not.

Ok, so the racket here is obvious. This is some kind of rite of passage, the driver is in collusion with the village, and now we can proceed with the game drive we are paying $2000/day to relish, surely. So it is time for lunch our guide says. We go to a place he suggests. It turns out the staff are AWOL, but we do get to see hippos basking in the sun. Pretty damn cool, and you are damn close a heap of hippos with fence between you and them which is how you want it, we linger here and get a good eyeball and then commence the hunt for lunch. We head to the Fairmont. We are fed good food, and then opt for some coffee and tea, overlooking more hippo infested water. Pretty damn cool, the bill comes for the coffee, I tap my card after eyeballing the number. It turns out the currency is miss set, and instead of paying 2000 shillings, I have paid $2000 for 3 lattes and a pot of green tea. Super cool. What is cool, is that this mistake is caught by the staff, and I am warned. My mother in law is amazed I am not more animated over the $2000 lattes, but I appreciate the honesty. I still feel a little unsettled, and the number of nibbles starts to feel a little personal. So it goes.

We are told by our driver there was some kind of assembly of conservancy leadership that day, and that our detractors are probably underpaid and hence grumpy. Surely a passing phase.

So we leave the Fairmont. Outside the gate, there is a jeep, eyeballing what appears to be a lioness in the grass. We stop for a hot second to appreciate the fauna. The jeep starts chasing us. Since we have not paid the fee for the conservancy directly outside the Fairmont, we are not allowed to eyeball the animals. Best be moving on. At this point the sun is starting to head south. Super cool. So $2000 to see 30 hippos and the whiskers of a lioness. This time we manage to drive to our camp without issue. Ok, chalk day one up to growing pains. We get to the camp, we are shown our cool tents nicely immersed in the untouched wilderness. We eat good food, and head for bed. The shower is warm, but not hot.

Dawn commeth. We consume breakfast. Coffee flows and ballast needs to be dropped, so I comply. On attempting to flush the toilet, it turns out low and behold there is no water. The people at the camp seem unsurprised there is no water. I feel like a war criminal as I would not have done what I did to that toilet with the knowledge the evidence would persist. We head out, we proceed to have one hell of a day at the Masai Mara National Park. We see a male lion up close, we see a lioness seek shelter from extreme rain, we see herd and herds of animal after animal. Fucking awesome. At 4pm, our guide is phoned by the front gate. It turns out that the camps card was not accepted as the banking system is down. So we start prematurely heading for the gate to resolve payment. Unfortunate, but so it goes. We get to the front gate, we collectively pool all of our cash, and the driver supplements this to cover the $1200 entrance fee for 6 people. At this point in time my paranoid delusions are cresting. What the fuck.

It turns out, we can’t go back to the camp and there is complexity which is being addressed. We are told the water pipe to the camp was actually cut, and that is why there was no running water. We are taken to the Fairmont to have dinner, while our guide makes a plan. We have an 80 year old and 2 70+ year olds in our group who spent the whole day bouncing around a jeep. We get the green light to head back to camp at 10pm as we will have an escort of elders from the conservancy who will provide protection from the agitated element who cut the water. We head out and promptly encounter a young leopard hunting 2 jackals. There is no jeep present to chase us this time, so we relish the moment. We get home, and have a nice non-optionally cold shower with water which has been trucked in. We sleep well.

Dawn comes. I head to breakfast. There is a line of upturned earth, but outside of that, the pristine wilderness abides and in the peace of dawn you could hear a sparrow fart. A couple people congregate in the foreground. Our party congregate for breakfast. Earth movers start moving earth as we drink coffee. Some members of our party assume the assembling mob are labourers who are going to assist in the excavation work. I notice these peeps are waving sticks and have machetes attached to their waists. I also notice staff from the camp watching this development rather pointedly. A couple fried eggs later, we watch as the assembled mob descend on one of the camps jeeps, deflate its tires and smash the back window. Some old dude advances with a party, and addresses the camp. There are still earth movers creating a trench around the camp. Trees are being cut down, and blockades are being assembled. The dude addressing the camp lets us know they have no beef with the guests. This is heart warming to hear as it looks like shit is about to go very south. There is a very credible threat of violence, and the atmosphere is incredibly tense. We are informed we are going to be extracted in order to avoid being present for a security operation. We collect our possessions, and we flee in a secreted jeep with inflated tires. We are relocated to a hovel, run by a frenchman who assures us we will find no better value abode in the Masai Mara. We have paid a pretty penny for luxury accommodation. Surely some of this penny flowethback. Surely. The day passes with zero animal sightings beyond zebra/wildebeast, which are basically ubiquitous. We find ourselves taking cold showers, grateful to emerge unscathed, for the mere princely sum of $2000 that day. Still superior to the $2000 kick in the head.

Dawn comes, we visit the Masai Mara National Park again. This time their card machine happily accepts my card. $1200 changes hands. This day is comparatively devoid of wildlife. There is no controlling such things.

On our final day, we visit a rhino sanctuary, a lovely place with cool rangers who sleep where the rhino sleep to make sure they persist. There are 2 rhino, a female Queen Elizabeth and her offspring. Her offspring has never known life outside of the sanctuary, so you can get ungodly close to an unstoppable juggernaut of an individual on foot. It is pretty magical to stand 10 meters from something so otherworldly/petrifying.

We are informed that a member of the camp has been hurt by the grumpy contingent. How hurt? Oh, not too bad. Please expand. It turns out he was driven into with a car and has a broken arm. Super cool.

At this junction in time, we are scooped up and transported onwards to the next leg of our journey, beyond the edge of the Masai Mara.