Maasai Village in the Serengeti

The visit with the Maasai people will be one of our favorite experiences in all of our travels. We stopped at this village, where 74 Maasai live. Our guide knows the son of the king of this village and he, Sangi, was our guide through the village. He was educated and his English was perfect. We were welcomed with song and dance. The Maasai "jump". They are well known for this. They jump for exercise, fun, ritual dance and "to get the girls". However, the girls also dance, so the same might be said that the girls jump to "get the guys". They don't just jump. They crazy jump! They jump over three feet high from a perfectly still standing position!
Sangi, took us through the village and into one house. The houses are made of sticks, that the young girls collect, hay and dried cow dung. If they have rain, they put goat skins on top of their houses if the dung washes away. There is one photo of a skin that is staked to the ground with wooden pegs drying in the sun.
Nicky needed to use the toilet! Their toilet is a outhouse. There are a few Maasai warriors stationed in the distance always watching for predators, so Sangi thought it was safe for him to head down the dirt path with the goats. It turned out to be safe.
Their jewelry was displayed along a fence. We walked all the way around the fence and picked out some things that we thought we could not live without. The ladies that had made the jewelry were all along the way, not pushing their wares on us like in some places we have been, but were very polite and happy we liked their work.
The lonely building you see is the school. The children that were in "class" were all very young. They were 3-5 year olds. When we stepped inside the school all of the children stood up and sang the ABC's in English! They were adorable. The little girls wanted to kiss Kathleen's hand. The little boys all wanted to shake Nicky's hand. All the boys were on the left side of the room and the girls were on the right. They were all sitting on wooded benches, no desks, no pencils, no paper, no crayons, no books...all they had was one small chalkboard and written on it was the ABC's and numbers. There was a donation box to help them with their school. It was a real eyeopener to say the very least.
There is a photo of a Maasai warrior in the distance coming back to the village. Sangi said he had been over the mountain either checking herds or delivering a message. Look how far away that mountain is! It must be about 6 miles to get there and then he had to climb over it and go wherever he needed to go and then turn around and come back! They are all very tall and very thin! When the warrior returns from a journey like that he can have milk. There is a photo of the shade of a tree and in the shade there are goat leather containers of milk! Those containers would have to be warm milk! There was one Maasai warrior laying in the grass in the shade exhausted for his trip. I don't think we took a picture of him, we were wondering if he was alive!
The whole idea of stretching your earlobes goes to a new level here. The small earlobe stretchers you see on people in the US are starter kits for these Maasai. They have large wooden pegs with which they stretch their earlobes. Some of them have stretched them out so far that they can wrap the bottom of their earlobe up and over their entire ear. It is a sign of beauty here.
Our visit was for a couple of hours. It was 2 of the best hours we have ever had.

Day two in the Serengeti...One Yellow Lion!

Day two in the Serengeti started out with seeing a leopard in a tree after we had only driven about 700 yards away from our tents!! Exciting!! We also saw a troop of baboons coming up a river bed and some that were just on the roadside. If looking at thee pictures makes you think we posted too many, we took almost 2,400 pictures in a five day period and it was a photographers dream. Since none of us are professional photographers, we did the best we could and picked out the ones we thought we blog worthy, 62 of them for this small section of our day. You have to keep in mind that we saw all these animals in the time it took us to leave our camp around 8:30a.m. and to arrive the other side of the Serengeti about 4 hours later. We spent the balance of the day visiting a Masaai village and another stop at a museum out in the middle of nowhere that is the site where the first signs of homo-erectus and homo-sapiens were found. Those photos will be the next posting.
This day was filled with lions, hippos, zebra, gazelle, wildebeests (gnu), mongoose, lions, leopards, giraffe, ostrich, warthogs, and the unbelievable sight of those thousands of animals in herds. Someone asked us when we returned if we saw a "crossing". That means, did the animals run in front of your vehicle. Well, the answer is WE were the crossing! They were constantly crossing. You can see in the photos that all kinds of animals were crossing and we were right in the middle of it all.
The zebra and the gnu. They are buddies. They hang out together and they protect each other. Some lay down and rest while the others stand as lookouts for predators. The zebra can stand in groups of three and rest their heads on each others backs and rest that way while standing. Very cool. If one gnu gets spooked, it causes thousands of zebra, gazelle, and gnu to start running off into the horizon as far as you can see. They were in this are of the Serengeti resting and eating. There was no wide river here for them to cross to see a big croc come up and snatch an unsuspecting gnu. Although, that is what Nicky wanted to see! Too bad. He will have to see it on National Geographic. To say we saw all there was to see may be a lie, but not really. We saw all we could ever hope to see and more. It was like a show. All the thousands and we aren't talking a few thousand, we are talking hundreds of thousands of animals were all around us. It was the great migration we had traveled so far to see. It was better than wonderful. It was surreal. A trip to this part of the world is hard to get to for sure. Worth it? No question. This will be a day we will love to remember forever.
The odd photos of the flat tire. A couple of missionaries for The Salvation Army had a flat tire out in the middle of nowhere and our guide gave him one of our spare tires! We served as AAA in the Serengeti!