The engine shudders and is silent. Outside the vehicle, jewelry adorned limbs jostle for position. A nimble hand slides my window open and forearm displaying almost a dozen colorful, beaded Maasai bracelets is thrust across my lap.
‘Miss! Miss! What is your name?’
‘Jina langu ni Malee,’ I say. I ask the woman’s name in Swahili, ‘Jina lako ni nani?’
She tells me her name is Ann. I untangle myself from my seatbelt to shake the hand attached to her bracelet decked wrist as the engine rumbles back to life.
After spending part of my childhood in Nairobi, I am back in Kenya for the first time in twenty years. It is surreal to be on safari again with my family— the Land Rover is also toting my parents, younger twin sisters and their husbands. As we rumble through the Seikani Gate into the Maasai Mara, I realize I have become the kind of visitor I derided as a child—a pampered tourist, outfitted in two-tone, quick-dry khaki, sliding helplessly in my seat in my frictionless clothing each time the Land Rover navigates an obstacle in the road.
The tawny grassland of the Maasai Mara seem s to go on forever, stretching to the horizon and melting seamlessly into the Serengeti plains in neighboring Tanzania. The tall grass dances in the breeze, rippling like the muscles of a lion’s back. We raise the Land Rover’s pop-up roof, and for the first time in two decades, my sisters and I jostle for position out the open top of the safari vehicle, a tangle of binoculars and telephoto lenses.
At first, the landscape appears almost devoid of life, the sweeping savannah vistas dotted with only occasional patches of scrubby acacia trees. It hardly seems possible these plains accommodate one of the greatest mass movements of the life on earth— the annual migration of over a million wildebeest, eland, Burchell’s zebra, and Thomson’s Gazelle.
The Mara also supports those preying on the great herds. A wide array of carnivores tracks the migrating ungulates, waiting patiently in the towering oat grass, or in the shadows of the flat top acacia. Lions are undoubtedly the dominant predators, the grassland seems almost made for the big cats, and the Maasai Mara Reserve hosts one of the highest densities of lions on earth.
As a kid, lions regularly occupied my daydreams, and occasionally my nightmares. On one camping trip with my family in Tsavo East National Park, we spent the night listening to cacophonous chaos unfold as a group of lions killed a young baboon. Another time, in the Nairobi Game Park, my father got almost halfway out of our car to retrieve something from the trunk before I noticed the tell- tale twitch of a black-tipped tail in the grass—a group of lionesses was sprawled lazily just a few meters away.
We arrive at a deep cleft in the road. The engine hums patiently. Peter, our driver, opens his door and leans out to assess the obstacle. The golden grass ripples around us, and for a moment, I think I see something moving tenderly through the soaring blades. My heart flutters and cool sweat beads at the surface of my skin. I feel a combined rush of awe and adrenaline I haven’t experience since childhood. Outside my window, a lilac-breasted roller perches on the decaying remnants of a termite mound, feathers a patchwork of lively pastels. Suddenly, the gears grind, the Land Rover lurches forward, and we are moving again.
We rattle across a bridge over the Mara River. Hippos bob in water below, like smooth boulders, relishing their predator-free existence. Weaver bird nests hang like ornaments in the branches of the yellow fever trees above.
I notice dark shapes dominating the landscape ahead. A group of elephants is feeding along the fringes of the riverine forest, their sandpaper skin immune to the scrubby thorns. They move purposefully, gently ushering adolescents away from the vehicle. We idle and watch. A female begins to lumber past us, and stops. She turns her head to face me, eyes wide, her long, soft lashes a seeming contraction to her rough, wrinkled skin. Slowly, the female rejoins the group and we continue toward Paradise Plain.
In the hills ahead, I can just make out the shape of our lodge. A lone Maasai giraffe stands blocking the road, a diligent sentry. He chews his cud, and observes us casually. In the distance, I can still see the elephants, meandering away from the river toward the open plain, casting a long shadow in the late afternoon sun. The giraffe licks his lips with a nimble, purple tongue. The engine idles and we wait, existing as just another singular piece of this vast ecosystem.
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