[January 16] was a travel day for our group of amateur astronomers basking in the Great Rift Valley and the [January 15] eclipse. But that wouldn’t stop us from doing a whole lotta stuff in addition to moving around Kenya. We awoke in our rooms at Lake Nakuru and breakfasted before driving back to Nairobi. The journey was fascinating, including barren areas, busy crossroads, shops of all kinds laden across the roadways (many of them loudly advertising cell phones and the Internet in their paint schemes), and spectacular stops at which to view the cascading Great Rift Valley below. Staring down into it, you could easily subtract all the modern elements and imagine what life must have been like here 200,000 or 2 million years ago, in the early days of our ancestors.
Our tour leader Melita Thorpe took us to lunch in Nairobi at Carnivore, a fancy restaurant that specializes in — you guessed it — meat. Huge slabs of beef, chicken, pork, ribs, lamb, sausages, livers, and even crocodile meat were carried around and served tableside until the group raised the white flag and “surrendered.” The fresh mango and passion fruit juice was a treat.
Astronomy’s travelers then split into two groups at a small airport in Nairobi and boarded bush planes. I was on the smaller one, a 14-seat, single-engine prop plane that lumbered up in the sky and gave us a smooth ride despite our apprehensions. The plane had a single pilot and fellow traveler Don Klemt sat in the co-pilot’s seat. We landed on a dirt airstrip at the Maasai Mara and began our greatest adventure yet.
At Lake Nakuru, the area where guests stay is fenced off from the surrounding countryside. Not so at the Mara, the country’s greatest game park. In Governor’s Camp, we each have a large tent with a full bedroom and bathroom ensemble — very swanky — that simply stands along the Mara River inside this mammoth park. Anything can wander by at any time — lions included. So walking to dinner after darkness requires an escort from a park staff member who carries an automatic rifle.
Late that afternoon we took our Land Rovers and conducted a short game drive, a sampler of this region that covers 930 square miles (1,500 square kilometers). A walk upriver revealed crocodiles along the bank — a short distance from my tent’s front flap — and a huge assembly of baboons on a rock shelf in the river and in numerous trees above. Several hippos were dipping down into the water for 2 minutes at a time and then coming up for air with a loud snort. The mesmerizing, overlapping, constant bird sounds added to the sensory experience that this is no zoo, but nature the way it really is in the very place where human beings first began to roam the planet.
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