Wild life | 26 July 2018

Maasai Mara

  Last night the hyenas made off with our fudge cake. We are camped with a group of four families on the banks of the Mara river, waiting for the wildebeest migration. During the night hours, tucked up in our sleeping bags, only slivers of canvas divide us from the African bush. It is very exciting to be roused from slumber by hyenas cackling as they canter between the guy ropes of the tents. You lie there listening to pods of hippo chortling, to the elephant and the lion, and baboons barking in the trees. This morning everybody said how well they had slept. It must be the fresh air, the feeling of the ground beneath your bedding roll, the delightful exhaustion after a day out on safari. At breakfast time following a dawn game drive, we discovered our nocturnal visitors had torn a hole in the kitchen tent flysheet and scoffed the cake — but the rest of the supplies are intact. Hosting the safari are Simeon and Bronwen, tea farmers from Kericho and veterans of the Mara, and under their direction everything in camp is perfect without this being ‘glamping’. Too luxurious and you lose the intimacy with nature. The shower is a bucket hoisted in a tree, filled with lashings of hot water from the campfire. The loo is a long drop dug on a high bank overlooking the river, where you sit in repose watching herds of antelope on the far side, or crocodiles gliding about in the brown swirls of the Mara waters. The camp is in a glade surrounded by trees and ox bow lakes. As I write this in the shade of a strangler fig, I can hear a boubou shrike and a fish eagle. A herd of buffalo grazes on the edge of the clearing.