Nairobi, Kenya - Entry 3

It's Monday morning and I'm back in the United States. The Conference ended last Wednesday, and on Thursday, we took a taxi to the domestic airport in Nairobi and got aboard a tiny charter plane that seated about twelve people. The French pilot handed a basket of caramels back to the passengers and then began making preparations for take-off. We were headed to Masai Mara.

We arrived at the park and were greeted by a guide in a Land Rover who was accompanied by a Masai hunter.

The Safari itself was actually quite amazing and I saw some of the most amazing things, including a pride of fourteen lions lounging on the road at sunset, a cheetah mother with three cubs, and I even saw three female lions eating an ostrich they had just killed.

The Safari driver contained a wealth of knowledge about the animals in the park and I was fascinated to learn about the different types of social behaviors that the animals exhibited. One of the most interesting things I learned was that the only animals that mate for life are Jackals and Dik-Diks (a small creature in the antilopinae subfamily). Allegedly, if one of their mates dies, they become depressed and essentially commit suicide by offering themselves to a predator.

In the evening, we returned to the campsite for dinner and watched a "leopard baiting" - a process in which a hunk of meat is hung up in a tree with the intention of attracting a leopard. Apparently, leopards have an extremely keen sense of smell and can detect fresh blood from up to five kilometers away. That night, the winds didn't carry properly, and we went to bed without seeing the leopard but eyes wide from everything else we had seen that day.

After two days on safari, I returned to Nairobi for a night. Getting ready for bed, I flicked on CNN and saw that Gary Coleman had decided to run for governor of California. After the wonders I had seen and experienced in Africa, it seemed like some sort of twisted reminder that I was returning home, to turn the television on and see Gary Coleman being interviewed on CNN.

Hearing a political hopeful saying things like, "Well, my friends wanted me to run and I thought it would be pretty cool," and "No, I'm not serious about running but I do believe in a flat tax," made me wonder what people around the world must be thinking about us. I finally drifted off to sleep, thinking that concerns about my country's international perception wasn't anything a one-night layover in Amsterdam wouldn't be able to fix.