The Maasai Mara is the one part of Kenya where the concentrations of game that existed in nineteenth century can still be seen and two years ago was named “seven wonders of the world” due to its commitment in co-tourism and conservation. The panorama sometimes resembles one of those wild-animal wall charts, where groups of unlikely looking animal companions are forced into the artists frame. You can see a dozen different species in one gaze: gazelle, zebra, giraffe, buffalo, topi, kongoni, wildebeest, eland, elephant, hyena, jackal, ostrich, and a pride of lions waiting for a chance. The most interesting areas, scenically and zoologically ,tend to be westwards, signaled by the long ridge of the Oloololo Escarpment .If you only have a day or two ,and you’re inside the reserve, you could do worse than spend most of your time here, near the Mara River.

It sometimes seems, however, that wherever there are animals there are people – in minibuses, in Land Cruisers, in rented Suzukis, often parked in ravenous, zoom-lens-touting packs around understandably irritable lions, leopards and cheetahs (the official limit is five vehicles around an animal at any one time) .This popularity is highly seasonal, and can be overbearing around Christmas and during the migration, but it need not spoil your visit. If you aren’t driving yourself, encourage your driver to explore new areas (obviously not off-road) and perhaps stress you’d rather experience the reserve in its totality than stick off animal species.

Visiting Maasai Villages

One diversion you’re likely to be offered, especially if traveling on an organized safari, is a visit to a Maasai enkang, usually incorrectly called a manyatta (an enkang is an ordinary homestead, a manyatta a ceremonial bush camp). Forget about the authenticity of tribal life: this is the real world. Children and old people are sick, young men have moved to the towns, and everyone wants your money. Unprepared and uncomfortable, most visitors find the experience either depressing or a bit of a rip-off, or both. You’ll pay around $ 20 per person if organized by your lodge, camp or safari driver, or around ksh 500 per person if you arrange it yourself, for the right to have a look around, peer inside some dwellings, and be on the receiving end of a determined sales pitch to get you to buy souvenirs. If you can forget any TV-documentary illusions, and actually sit down and talk to the Maasai (there will always be people who speak a little English), the experience can be transformed and full of interest and laughter.

The Animals

Big brunette lions are the best-known denizens of the Maasai Mara .Between five hundred and a thousand lions live here, and there are usually several prides around the Musiara Swamps, which are dry much of the year. It is sometimes possible to watch them hunt, as they take very little notice of vehicles .The Mara Predators project, run by Living with Lions, is creating an online ID database of the North Mara prides. Lodge guides use the lion’s facial whisker spots to identify individuals and visitors are encouraged to get involved by reporting sightings at www.marapredatorproject.blogspot.com.

While lions seem to be lounging under every other bush, finding a cheetah is much harder (they can quite often be seen on the murram mounds alongside the Talek-Sekenani road). These are solitary cats-slender, unobtrusive and somewhat shy-and vulnerable to harassment. Their natural hunting times are dawn and dusk, but there is evidence that they are turning to hunting during the middle of the day, when the humans are shaded in the lodges. This is not a good time of day for the cheetah, which expends terrific energy in each chase and may have to give up if it goes on for more than thirty or forty seconds. When they move, cheetahs exhibit marvelous speed and agility and, you’re lucky enough to witness a kill, it’s likely to take place in a cloud of dust a kilometer from where the chase began.

Leopards are more rarely seen, though there are plenty of them. You can give yourself a serious case of risen hair when you come across their footprints down on the sandbanks at the edge of the Mara River outside the reserve boundary, where guided walks are permitted. They are largely nocturnal and prefer to remain well out of sight. Their deep, grating roar at night-a grunt, repeated -is a sound which, once heard, you carry around with you.

Rangers are certain to know the current news about the black rhinos-every calf born is a victory- though finding them is often difficult. Check out the thickets of desert date trees (Balanites) near Little Governors marsh, or Rhino Ridge, where one or two of the reserves surviving faru are sometimes obligingly positioned. There are also some white rhinos in the area, brought in from South Africa and living in the Ol Choro Oirouwa Rhino Sanctuary in the conservancy of the same name, close to Mara Safari Club. The sanctuary www.olchoro.blogspot.com and there is entry fees of $5 per person in upstream along the Mara River, well to the north of the reserve.

Maasai Mara\’s other heavyweights are about in abundance. The Mara River surges with hippo, while big families of elephant traipse along the forested river and stream margins and spread out across the plains when there’s plenty of vegetation to browse. The park is home t an estimated thousand or so elephants, with another five hundred living in the districts beyond its boundaries.

Buffalo are seen all over and can be menacing when they surround a vehicle on its own. It is the solitary old bulls that you need to watch out for- their reputation is not exaggerated .Tourists vehicles get stoved in quite often, so always back off.

Among all these outstanding characters, the herds of humble grazers can quickly fade into the background. It’s easy to become blase when one of the much-hyped “big five” (elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, leopard) isn’t eyeballing you at arms length-but those are the hunters trophies. Warthog families like rows of dismantled Russian dolls, Zebra, and gazelle, odd-looking hartebeest and slick, purple-flanked topi are all scattered with abandon across the scene. The topi are peculiarly characteristic of Maasai Mara, and there are always one or two in every herd standing sentry on a grass tussock or an old termite mound. The reserve also has rare herds of roan antelope- swaggering ,horse-sized animals with sweeping ,curved horns, that you’ll see elsewhere only in Ruma National Park near Lake Victoria .

The Wildebeest Migration

It is the annual wildebeest migration; however, that has planted Maasai Mara so firmly in the popular imagination. With a lemming-like instinct, the herds gather in their hundreds of thousands in May and June on the withering plains of Serengeti to begin the long, streaming journey northwards, following the scent of moisture and green grass in the Mara. They arrive in July and August, pouring over the Sand River and into the Sekenani side of the reserve, gradually munching their way westwards towards the escarpment in a milling, unsettled mass, and turning south again, back to the Serengeti, in October .Never the most graceful of animals, wildebeest seem to play up to their appearance with unpredictable behavior: bucking like wild horses, springing like jack-in-the boxes, or suddenly sprinting off through the herd for no apparent reason.

The Mara River is the biggest obstacle they come up against .Heavy rains falling up on the Mau Range where the river rises can produce a brown flood that claims thousands of animals as they try to cross. Like huge sheep (they are, in fact, most closely related to goats), the brainless masses swarm desperately to the banks and plunge in. Many are fatally injured on rocks and fallen branches; others are skewered by flailing legs and horns. With every surge, more bodies bob to the surface and float downstream. Heaps of bloated carcasses line the banks: injured and dying animals struggle in the mud: while vultures and marabou stork’s squat in glazed, post-prandial stupor.

Through it all, the spotted hyenas scamper and loiter like psychopathic sheep dogs. Half a million wildebeest calves are born in January and February before the migration, of which two out of three perish without returning to the Serengeti.

If you want to know things are looking in the run-up to your visit, check out www.wilbebeestmigration.blogspot.com

The Maasai People

After deep reflection on my people and culture, I have painfully come to accept that the Maasai must change to protect themselves, if not their culture .They must adapt to the realities of the modern world for the sake of their own survival .It is better to meet an enemy out in the open and to be prepared for him than him to come upon you at home unawares. Written by Tepilit Ole Saitoti.

Of all Kenya\’s peoples, the Maasai have received the most attention. Often strikingly tall and slender, dressed in brilliant red cloth, with beads, metal jewellery, and – for young men -long, ochred hairstyles, they have a reputation for ferocity, pampered by an arch superiority complex. Traditionally, they lived off milk and blood (extracted, by a close shot with a stumpy arrow, from the jugular veins of their live cattle), and they loved their herds more than anything else, rarely slaughtering a beast. They maintained rotating armies of Spartan warriors -the morani- who killed lions as a test of manhood. And they opposed all interference and invasion with swift, implacable violence. Their scorn of foreigners was absolute: they called Europeans, who came swaddled in clothing, iloridaa enjerkat or “those who confine their farts”. They also derived African peoples who cultivated by digging the earth-the Maasai even left their dead unburied -while those who kept cattle were given grudging respect so long as they conceded that all the worlds cattle were a gift from God to the Maasai ,whose incessant cattle-raiding was thus righteous reclamation of stolen property. Cattle are still at the heart of Maasai society. There are dozens of names for different colours and patterns, and each animal among their three million is individually cherished.

Some of this noble savagery was undoubtedly exaggerated by Swahili and Arab slave and ivory traders, anxious to protect their routes from the Europeans .At the same time, something close to a cult of the Maasai has been around ever since Thomson walked through Maasailand in 1883 .In the early years of the colony, Governor Delameres obsession with the people and all things Maasai spawned a new term ” Maasai -it is” , and with it a motley crop of romantic notions about their ancestors ,alluding to ancient Egypt and Rome, and even to the lost tribes of Israel.

The Maasai have been assailed on all sides: by uplands farmers expanding from the north; by eviction from the tourist/conservation areas within the Maasai Mara boundaries: and by a climate of opposition to their traditional lifestyle from all around. Sporadically urged to grow crops, go to school, build permanent houses, and generally settle down and stop being a nuisance, the Maasai face an additional dilemma in squaring these edicts with the fickle demands of the tourist industry for traditional authenticity .Maasai dancing is the entertainment, while necklaces ,gourds and spears ,shields ,rungus (clubs) ,busts (carved by Kamba carvers) and even life-sized wooden morani,to be shipped home in a packaging case, are the stock-in-trade of the souvenir shops. For the Maasai themselves, the rewards are fairly scant. Few make much of living selling souvenirs, but enterprising morani can do well by just posing for photos and even better if they hawk themselves in Nairobi or down on the coast.

Many men preserve with their warrior hood, though modern Kenya makes few concessions to it. The Morani arrested for hunting lions and prevented from building manyattas for the eunoto transition in which they pass into elder hood, have kept most of the superficial marks of the warrior without being able to live the life fully.

Maasai Mara game reserve “the seven wonders of the world” is the major tourists attraction in Kenya for cultural and wildlife safaris. The Big five animals are found in the Maasai Mara and the Maasai live around the game reserve and the tourists can visit the manyattas to learn and see their cattle\’s, souvenirs and see how they live.Maasai Mara safaris is segmented into various categories namely road safaris, air safari flights and private air charter flights and the accommodation is tailor made http://wingsoverafrica-aviation.com/index.php/safaris-east-Africa/Kenya-tour-packages.html

Anthony Mmeri is the Editor and Senior Aviation Director at Wings over Africa Safaris Limited. This is a Safari Holiday Expert Company that specializes on Kenya Wildlife Safaris | Kenya Cultural Safaris | Air Safari & Private Charter Flights Maasai Mara Game Reserve. The website has guided thousands of travelers to achieve their dream holiday. For more information and guidance, visit the site at http:// http://wingsoverafrica-aviation.com/index.php/safaris-east-Africa/Kenya-tour-packages.html

Author Bio: Maasai Mara game reserve “the seven wonders of the world” is the major tourists attraction in Kenya for cultural and wildlife safaris. The Big five animals are found in the Maasai Mara and the Maasai live around the game reserve and the tourists can visit the manyattas to learn and see their cattle\’s, souvenirs and see how they live.Maasai Mara safaris is segmented into various categories namely road safaris, air safari flights and private air charter flights and the accommodation is tailor made http://wingsoverafrica-aviation.com/index.php/safaris-east-Africa/Kenya-tour-packages.html

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