Ballooning over the Masai Mara, Masai village and more

Thursday, July 3, 2014  Masai Mara

This trip is not easy.  Up this morning at 4 AM to get to the launch site for our balloon over the Masai Mara before dawn.  We were awakened with coffee and/or hot chocolate and set out as excited as can be.  Liftoff was just as dawn was breaking, and we had an incredible hour and a quarter floating over the plain, looking at the incredible animals:

After landing we had an amazing champagne breakfast:

That was just the beginning of a full day.  The next activity was a visit to a Masai village.  Our camp, Leleshwa, employs a number of local villagers, and when clients want to visit, they rotate which village to visit.  We went to the home town of one of the security guards.  We learned so much about the Masai, whose world and lives are as different from ours as they could be.  Traditionally nomadic herders of cattle and sheep, they are more and more becoming semi-nomadic living in small villages in semi-permanent homes.  The village is arranged in a circle of structures, and the cattle are out to graze during the day but in the circle at night to protect them from marauding predators.  They have no electricity or plumbing.  The homes are tiny and windowless, with cooking fires inside and very poor chimneys, so they are very smoky all the time:

The diet is traditionally made up of meat, milk and cow blood—a typical breakfast is warm fresh milk mixed with freshly drawn cow blood (from the jugular vein of the cow) and some smoked meat.  They have just begun to incorporate some grains into their diet and do have some corn meal based things.  There is no local agriculture and they have no vegetables.  Here is one of the elders with one of our elders.  He has very large holes in his earlobes:

The men gathered and chanted/sang and danced for us, incorporating us into the dancing!

There is a tradition of jumping which is amazing to see.  With no apparent wind-up, they pop into the air, amazingly high:

Josh did his best to do as well:

The children look well enough nourished, but they are very dirty and surrounded by so many flies that they don’t even shoo them away:

Women are married at puberty just after they are “circumcised” to men in their early 20’s, who dominate the family and make all decisions.  The women came out and danced for us to their own chanting/singing and incorporated our women into the dance:

Then the men demonstrated starting a fire with two pieces of wood, something I had tried to learn as a Boy Scout but had totally failed at.  They made it look easy.  They need to be able to make fire when they are far away with their cattle, and they know how to do it.

Finally, they opened their “shop” where they sold their handicrafts:

The buying process was odd—you selected the things you wanted to buy, and brought them outside the display area where you bargained for the total cost of everything you had chosen.  We didn’t bargain very hard:

By now we were hungry and tired, and went back to the camp for lunch and a brief rest.  In the late afternoon we went to a local school.  Although education is compulsory in Kenya, it is only recently that the Masai have begun sending children for a traditional education, part of the transition from a nomadic life to a settled one.  The headmaster was very proud of the accomplishments of his students, who have performed well on Kenyan standardized testing, despite very basic facilities:

We watched the boys put on a chanting and marching demonstration, making formations not unlike those our marching bands do:

Our five children then joined in the somewhat wild soccer game already underway, and Oren looked good playing with much larger children:

We went back to our camp, washed up, and were treated to a wonderful last dinner at Leleshwa, under the stars, preceded by drinks around a fire:

After dinner the staff put on a wonderful show of chanting and dancing, ultimately incorporating us into the performance.  

By now it was after 9:00, we had been up since 4:00 AM, and we collapsed into our rooms, needing to pack and be at the local air strip to meet our charter plane at 10:00 the next morning.