What a day!!!
We have just got back from our first game drive, showered, and made a cup of coffee. It is 1900 and dinner is in 1 hour. Our driver scared us momentarily by saying the morning drive was at 0330 but hastily corrected himself with 0630! I can deal with that.
We left home this morning just after six, when it was still dark, and the drums were already beating and Salvation Army people singing to encourage people to go to their church. It wasn’t long before it was light: like in Australia, here it gets light and gets dark much more abruptly than in Ireland.
An hour into our trip, as we skirted Kisumu, I said lightly to Jon “did you remember your malaria medication?” (He was diagnosed yesterday) ... surprise surprise, he did forget! So there was a little bit of a panic while we worked out where we could find said medication at 0730 on a Sunday morning - but thankfully we found a county hospital in a place called Ahero.
After that, the drive was pretty uneventful for the next three hours or so. We passed the equator, lots of tea plantations, tropical vegetation, and then the terrain started changing as we climbed the hills and the tea plantations turned into savannah. Cactus and flat topped acacia began to line the roads, donkeys grazed on the side strips instead of cows and goats, and it was noticeably drier.
The final 35km of the road to Fairmont started at a little village called Mulot. The resort gave us a “map” which was basically an A4 page with a few random landmarks to show us how to get there from Mulot. The first few were pretty accurate... and then it was anyone’s guess! We passed multiple schools and villages not marked on the map, other landmarks simply weren’t there, and to add to that, the Jeep kept stalling due to the bumpiness of the road and the slowness of our pace. Jon says it has a problem with the carburettor, in any case not being able to put it into low gears meant that the spark plugs were getting dirty and every time the engine started again we were very relieved. The 35km took us two entire hours!
As we approached the Mara, the villages became less and less frequent (the houses were circular mud huts with grass roofs) and we began to see wild animals. First, it was zebra, then impala and giraffes - and to our surprise, a leopard crossed the road directly in front of us! This was especially exciting for Sarah, who has always wanted to see a leopard, and apparently out of the Big 5, the leopard is the rarest.
At the Fairmont Mara, we were met by two staff members who took our bags and gave us damp towels to wipe our faces and hands. We were then led into reception where we were given passion fruit juice and forms to fill in.
Once this was done, we were told that we had thirty minutes til lunch finished and then an hour later was our first game drive! We went straight to lunch which was a three course a la carte meal. All meals are included in our stay - drinks are extra. After lunch, we barely had fifteen minutes to organise ourselves to go on our game drive.
It was incredible! We saw so much wildlife. Let me try to list them... Thompson gazelles, impala, dikdiks (the smallest of the antelopes), topi, elands, bush bucks, water bucks, baboons, 11 giraffes, 2 hyena, leopards (again, this one a mother & cub!), 4 lions, 5 buffalo, zebra, warthogs, wildebeest... probably more but I just can’t remember them all!
When we got back from the drive our driver wanted to know if we wanted to pay extra to visit a Masai village tomorrow. To be honest, the answer is no! We get plenty of time in villages and they will probably try to sell us stuff the whole time - and we don’t really want to pay more on top of what we are paying, even if we do have concession prices! In fact, as we already have game drives (included) from 0630-0830 and 1530-1830, what we would really like to do is relax by the pool (preferably with cocktails)
Hopefully tomorrow I will get lots of really nice photos of the resort - it is pretty incredible - African but quite first world!
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