Safari to Kenya – Planning

Safari! 

The word evokes images of the Savannah.  Elephants grazing on the plentiful vegetation.  Lion cubs frolicking with their siblings under the watchful eyes of their mothers.  Massive herds of Zebra and Wildebeest on their annual migration, making the perilous crossing over the Mara River, where the Crocodiles await their annual feast! The cackle of Hyenas and the rasp of Vultures jockeying for position on a (mostly eaten) kill.  Gazelles, kudus and buffaloes grazing on the expansive grasslands keeping an eye out for predators.  Hippos wallowing in the rivers, waterholes and lakes, then heading out to land for their evening munchies!  Giraffes eating the leaves off the Acacia and Mimosa trees that dot the landscape.  A Flamboyance of Flamingos feeding on lake dwelling insects and shrimp (I learned recently that Flamingos are born white-gray and turn pink due to their diet!). A lone Cheetah sitting on a rock intently surveying the landscape.  An ecosystem filled with life, yet under constant pressure from human settlement, not to mention poaching which continues to be a serious problem in Africa.

A tidbit I picked up while researching this trip: In Swahili, the word Safari means a “journey” and it is derived from the Arabic noun safar.  Interestingly, the word safar in Hindi means journey or travel and is likely derived from Arabic.

Why a Safari, and why now?

The reasons are straight-forward. As some of you may know, I took a voluntary buyout (VBO) from Fidelity Investments in 2021 after working there for a shade under 29 years.  My last day at work was Friday, December 31, 2021.  I fully intended to spend the first 2 quarters of 2022 travelling, and scratching items off my lengthy bucket-list while simultaneously scratching my travel itch!  But then the Omicron variant of Covid-19 took hold and has run rampant over the last couple of months.  This threw off my schedule, but I can be pretty determined at times (more stubborn than anything else, I suppose)!  So, armed with Excel and statistical data from the World Health Organization’s Covid Dashboard, I started tracking trends for countries on my bucket list, looking for opportunities to travel safely.

Part of the problem was to find countries that were admitting tourists; many shut down at a week’s notice, even to their own citizens in some cases.  Early on, my “plans” to visit Japan and the Far East fell through when Japan didn’t want to issue visas.  Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Middle East were hit badly with Omicron, and Israel began to permit only essential travel.  Originally, my plan was to go on Safari after visiting the Middle East, but thankfully, a review of the data clearly showed that Kenya recovered from Omicron early in February 2022. Based on the data and with Kenya remaining open to visitors, a Safari seemed by far the safest activity possible, despite tepid vaccination rates in East Africa.

I am making this sound so cut-and-dry, but it is not at all like that!  In the early-1980s in Dehradun (Uttarakhand, India), my sister and I grew up on a steady diet of books by the likes of Salim Ali, Jim Corbett, Kenneth Anderson and Joy Adamson. We got into birding and shared nature rambles through the Forest Research Institute (FRI) as Appa was posted to the Indian Military Academy which fortuitously was adjacent to the FRI.  I think that’s probably where our love for nature really began.  Unfortunately, since I started working in 1989, I haven’t spent any time continuing to kindle this particular interest.  But a Safari has perennially been in the top-5 on my bucket list.

Even then, I might not have pulled the trigger (oops – poor choice of words for a Safari focused blog!) except for a serendipitous conversation with Shekhar, a close friend, who told me of a friend of his from “B-school” who left his day-job in the Telecom industry and now owned a Safari camp on a wildlife conservancy just outside of Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya.  This prompted me to get going on the detailed planning, and I am super-excited to share that this Safari is really happening, barring any last-minute surprises!  Iris and I are off to Kenya in early March for a 12-day Safari (16 days, if you count travel days, and time spent in Nairobi).

It has been three frenetic weeks of “work” to make this trip of a lifetime a reality. 

This included reading books on Safari planning focused on Kenya, watching videos on YouTube to understand what we could expect, putting together an itinerary based on what we wanted to see, deciding on tented camps vs lodges, working out the logistics of travelling within Kenya with Shekhar’s friend (a mix of Air and Land), deciding what gear to buy and shopping for it –clothing, boots, insect repellent, camera and lenses, bags (you can’t carry suitcases on the small Cessna Caravan C208B’s that transport you from Nairobi to the bush camps all over Kenya), packing cubes, rain gear and what-nots – getting visas (thankfully, there’s an e-visa option – so you can do everything on-line) and numerous other things I am missing.  At any rate, here’s an outline of our plan.

Itinerary

Tue, March 1 – Wed, March 2: We leave the evening of Tuesday, March 1 from JFK Airport in NY and fly to Nairobi via Amsterdam on KLM.  We arrive at Nairobi around 10pm on Wed, March 2 and check-in to the Sarova Panafric hotel for two nights.

Wed, March 2 – Thu, March 3: We decompress after the travel days, and take in some sights in Nairobi.

Fri, March 4 – Sat, March 5: We are up early and take a 45-minute Safari Link flight from Wilson Airport in Nairobi into Amboseli National Park, southeast of Nairobi and on the Tanzanian border.  We spend the next 2 nights at Porini Amboseli Camp in Selenkay Conservancy.  We hope to see elephants with a backdrop of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, just over the border in Tanzania!  We are doing game drives each day.

Sun, March 6 – Mon, March 7: We fly back to Nairobi to take another Cessna to Samburu National Reserve in the northwest of Kenya.  We spend 2 nights at the Elephant Bedroom Camp on the banks of the Ewaso Nyiro River.  This camp is just north of the equator and has different species of animals compared to the southern part of Kenya.  Bonus: Samburu National Reserve is in the Great Rift Valley that stretches almost 5,000 miles from the Middle East through Ethiopia and Kenya south to Mozambique.

Anthropological detour: Humankind is believed to have evolved somewhere along the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. The Leakey family famously worked in the field and made significant contributions to this body of knowledge. Louis and Mary Leakey found various hominid fossils in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and established that our species originated in East Africa.  Later, Mary was a member of the team that discovered Lucy in 1974, 40% of a female of the species Australopithecus Afarensis, in the Afar Depression in present-day Ethiopia. Richard Leakey, their son, made significant anthropological finds in Kenya early in his career but, later in life, shifted his focus to wildlife conservation. Sadly, he passed away this year.

Tue, March 8 – Thu, March 10: We drive 7 hours southwest from Samburu to Lake Elmenteita, a soda lake in the Rift Valley.  Here, and nearby at Lake Nakuru, we hope to see Flamingos and other wildlife.  We spend 3 nights at Sunbird Lodge on the shores of Lake Elementeita.  We plan on doing some boating on Lake Naivasha, a significant place in Joy Adamson’s Born Free, Living Free and Forever Free trilogy.  We also plan to hike up Mount Longonot, a dormant stratovolcano, one afternoon before heading off to the Maasai Mara.

Fri, March 11 – Mon, March 14: We drive 4 hours further southwest to the Maasai Mara National Reserve.  We are staying 4 nights at the Porini Cheetah Camp in Ole Kinyei conservancy.  Shekhar’s friend is part-owner of the camp and is helping us organize this entire trip.  While at the camp, we have morning, afternoon and some night game drives planned and hope to see quite a bit of Africa’s big five.

Tue, March 15: We fly back to Nairobi’s Wilson Airport after an early morning walk with the Maasai warriors in Porini Cheetah camp.  At the airport we take a RT-PCR Covid test (required to fly back to the US) and then head to the Eka Hotel where we spend Tuesday night.

Wed, March 16: We might do some souvenir-shopping, if I know Iris!  We check-out as late as the hotel permits and then head to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to catch our 11pm flight to Paris.

Thu, March 17: We have a 7 ½ hour layover at Paris before we catch our onward flight to JFK Airport in New York.  We get into New York at about 6pm Eastern time and Uber it back to Parsippany.

That’s all folks! We are off on March 1 to sunny Kenya and hope to come back with a treasure chest of experiences. We’ll take lots of pictures and I’ll blog about the experience once back home. I do hope you enjoyed reading my very first blog!