Part II - Maasai Mara Safari

 Sorry, I had to start again.....this was one of the first animals we saw, he was just sleeping under a tree, a wonderful, mature lion (Simba), altogether we saw 8, some cubs and a female mother.  During the day the sleep and hunt at night.

A face only ....a mother could love, our guide said warthogs are made from..."a bunch of spare parts", we saw way more than we wanted to see, besides no one wants to eat a WARTHOG.Pretty typical vista, don't you love the sky?

 Our favorite animal...the cheetah!
Very graceful, day hunter, most elegant of the cats.   We saw quite a few, took many different pictures, saw a mother and two cubs, stalking their prey.

This female lion was very hungrey, she was digging in a warthog hole, but no lunch for her that day!  Her cubs weren't too far away.  Wisih we could help.

 We came upon a den of spotted hyaena's -- a pack of 14-16, with many cubs.  They weren't too shy and we observed them for quite a while, kind of ugly and vicious, but the cubs were cute.

 Quite often we were able to get multiple animals in the same picture.  Check out the Lion along with a family of elephants.  It was amazing they were not spooked by the jeeps as we rolled up and watched them.

 This mother elephant didn't want us to close to her baby.  Cute guy huh?

Here is one of the more elusive of the cats....full grown Cheetah.  There hard to find and we were lucky to see 6-8 of them over the 3 days.  So, the goal was to see the Big Five - they are the Elephant, Lion, Leopard, Cape Buffalo and the Rhino....we looked and looked, but we never did see a Rhino, there was a sighting but he was too elusive and went into the bushes.

We love this shot of the Cape Buffalo, he was whallowing in the mud and lovin' every minute. 

Just as a final note, Kenya has many wonderful animals to see, but the numbers are dwindling, too many poachers, too many people occupying the land and eliminating these amazing animals.  Its not like what you see on National Geographic and Disney's Nature....there are 1/4th of the animal numbers that used to be in Kenya.  So now you can see why we treasure this experience.  Kenya has so many resources but they just don't have the expertise to preserve the natural wonders when there is so many people/poverty and so little money.  I worry about the future of both!  

Wish we could have included more pictures, but I'm limited on this blog.

We'll talk soon,  Love to All