The Great Migration in Maasai Mara

Organising a joint trip from Nairobi to Maasai Mara in August was a challenge. On the one hand, prices were high and tour operators were scarce due to the Great Migration coinciding with the summer holidays in Europe and America. On the other hand, many people living in Nairobi left the country for the summer holidays, which made it difficult to recruit friends for a joint journey and thus keep costs low. On the week of our departure, I finally managed to assemble a critical mass of five people to undertake the trip together.

In retrospect, the signs that not everything would go smoothly were there from the very beginning. On our way out of Nairobi towards the edge of the Rift Valley, especially while going uphill, I noticed that we were being overtaken by almost every car on the road except for trucks. To preserve my peace of mind, I attributed it to our car being a safari van: it was not the speediest, but it could handle rough terrain. Then, as we made our way down the slopes into the Rift Valley, we could smell the brakes through the partly open windows. In the closest city, the driver asked us to wait for a moment while he refilled the car’s braking liquid.

We arrived at our hotel after eleven o’clock at night. We had left only a little later than we had planned – half past three instead of three – but we accrued a substantial delay during the last leg of the journey, when the darkness closed in and we had to slow down for safety’s sake. On top of that, the driver struggled to find our hotel, for which he managed to contort a way to blame the hotel itself. As the rain pounded on our roof and we trundled our way over the boulders, we eventually received enough guidance from passing drivers to find the lodge.

We arrived by the gate of the park just after seven o’clock in the morning. Most tourists staying outside the park would only arrive later, so the line was short, and we made our payments quickly. From the very beginning, the number of animals struck me as surprisingly high in comparison to my previous drives in Nakuru, Nairobi National Park, Amboseli, and Tsavo. The paths wound their way past zebras and wildebeests, who were busy congregating in ever larger herds, as well as the rather dim-looking hartebeests and topis. In the afternoon, the herds of wildebeests started moving: we could see them from afar spilling down the hillsides and over the plains, with those at the front stopping every few hundred metres to let the rearguard catch up.

Beside the wildebeests, we also saw quite a few large animals like buffalo, elephants, and giraffes, as well as predators like hyenas and lions. The wildebeests were too far away from the Mara River to attempt a crossing for several days, but we did see a few crocodiles lying in wait and a few hippos nearby simply minding their own business. Close to the border with Tanzania, we crossed the Mara Bridge. The air smelled foul, and we soon discovered the reason: the banks were filled with the carcasses of wildebeests that did not make it across the river. The driver said they were killed by the crocodiles, who always kill more gnus than they can eat and keep their rotting bodies to feast on in leaner times.

At around four o’clock, we noticed that our driver had begun to drive much more slowly and carefully. We had already helped push the car up a hill when he failed to shift gears after crossing a small bridge, and pushing from right above the exhaust pipe, I saw the smoke rise in thick dark clouds. We stopped at the airfield “to let the engine cool down,” as the driver said. In reality, we waited around while the driver recruited a colleague to help him investigate the engine. We departed again after what seemed like quite a long while, trailing the car whose driver had been talking to ours and followed by another, but it did not take long for the driver to make another stop. This time was final: we had to split up and hitch a ride with the two other tourist vehicles, while a third car towed our van to the garage.

Given his lack of preparation, I doubted the driver would think of a Plan B should the van be beyond repair. And, given his patchy communication with us, I suspected he might keep his boss completely in the dark. I did not like our odds, so as soon as we had exchanged awkward pleasantries with the Spanish tourists whose vehicle we had invaded, I texted the driver’s boss to apprise him of the situation. Of course, the driver assured me the van would be repaired by the next morning, but it was the boss who stepped in when – inevitably – it was not. I woke up at six o’clock in the morning to a text message from the driver saying that the car could not be fixed, with no further information. His boss, however, had arranged for another car to pick us up for a morning drive, after which we were handed over to a van that took us back to Nairobi. The driver, in the meantime, seemed perfectly convinced that he could have done nothing better despite the number of issues that he must have known about before beginning the journey.

Having seen a lot the previous day, we did not feel much pressure to scour the park for lions and big game. Instead, we were content to ride around looking at the less popular animals like mongooses, secretary birds, and monitor lizards. Still, we ended up seeing quite a few charismatic animals, including several lions, a serval, a cheetah, and a black rhino in the far distance.