We have tons of photos from our recent safari, as you’ll see . . . Ted has a great camera with something like 80 times zoom. Some of the people we saw in other safari vans had huge zoom attachments and they looked like Hollywood paparazzi snapping away.
We were able to see four of the so-called Big Five right on our very first game drive – amazing! The Big Five is a term originally from game-hunting and does not necessarily represent the five animals everyone wants to see the most. It consists of the lion, elephant, cape buffalo, leopard, and rhino. We didn’t see elephants until our second day in the Masai Mara, but we saw everything else our first day at Lake Nakuru. We didn’t expect to see a leopard at all, as they are very shy and elusive creatures but we ended up seeing two! Or it may have been the same one, just shifted over to a new tree.
When we were still in France, as part of home-schooling, Mitchell did a project on his own personal Big Five (the five African mammals he was most looking forward to seeing). They included the lion, elephant, giraffe, zebra and rhino. He wrote a one-page “fact sheet” on each of these animals and was our resident expert on their behaviours and habits on each game drive.
We stayed two nights in lodges (far more luxurious than we were expecting) and one night at a tented camp. For the game drives, it was just the four of us, plus our driver/ guide, in our van. At first, we wondered if this was a good idea in the sense that it might be fun to share in the excitement of seeing all the animals with another family. But in the end we were glad. The van could seat about 10 people, so we had lots of room to spread out and we each had a window. Plus anytime we wanted to stand and look out the pop-up roof, there was plenty of room. We saw other vans packed with people and it didn’t look too comfortable. It was also nice not to have to worry about what other passengers would think when our kids yelled things out the window like “Hey Marty!” “Hey Melman, how’s it goin?” (characters from the Madagascar movies). And besides that, we met lots of great people at the tented camp and lodges so we had company at meal-times.
Ted, Mitchell & Jackson took the majority of these photos. Up to this point, Jackson hasn’t been overly interested in using a camera but he really took to it while on safari. He now tells us he wants to be a wildlife photographer when he grows up, which we assured him would be a very cool job indeed. He’s been drawing colorful pictures of African animals ever since, which is a nice change from his usual hockey arena, soccer field, and baseball stadium sketches :)
As we write this, we’re in Zanzibar (an island in the Indian ocean off the east coast of Tanzania). So different from the Africa we’ve seen so far. Kenya is very Christian but this region of Tanzania is quite Muslim. More mambo jambo about that later . . . cheers! 
