Finally, the new year

For most of the last two months, nobody was keen to wish anyone a happy 2008. The new year has finally arrived in Kenya, and we couldn't be happier to hear it. Raila and Kibaki signed an agreement to set up a coalition government, creating the post of prime minister and two deputies, dividing the cabinet between the two parties, and sharing power in Parliament. MPs from both parties have agreed to push through necessary constitutional changes and get this thing rolling. From the way Raila, Kibaki, and the MPs are talking, this is really going to happen. Soon.

Yay!

As things really calm down around Kenya, police presence is returning to Nairobi. We're expecting hawkers to be driven out of the city center any day now, as MPs no longer need their votes and the police aren't busy keeping chaos from breaking out. Yesterday morning, right after stepping onto the USIU bus in city center, Amanda and I heard shouting and looked out the window to see men with signs running past us, away from clouds of tear gas. The few of us on the bus shut all the windows and watched. They had been protesting for Maina Njenga, a Mungiki leader who was just rearrested. The police really aren't fooling around. There have also been clashes with hawkers who don't want to vacate the downtown district.

So a bit about my recent trip!

Although I can't help feeling that my heart is and will always be in Lamu, Maasai Mara was one of the most incredible places I've ever been. I had made up my mind to not enjoy myself on the trip because I'm too proud to let myself be treated like a tourist... and when you're on safari, you can't escape the “Jambo”s. But wow. What a place.

Our camp, Tipilikwani, was more of a resort than a camp. The owner was fantastic, and his wife is the chef I aspire to be. They also had two pet mongooses that liked nothing better than biting my toes under the dinner table. My cabin-tent hybrid overlooked the Talek River, on the other side of which stretched the Mara, so at night I could hear lions and hyenas crying to one another. They do wander into the camp on occasion, so after sunset you have to call a Maasai askari to escort you around the camp. Anyway, KJ put me in a four-person suite with a clawed foot bathtub by myself, which I thoroughly enjoyed (weird story of the trip – I was so excited to have my own room for a change, I slept in my underwear the first night. Bad news is, temperatures in the Mara plummet overnight, so I woke up for our sunrise game drive around 5:30 and froze my ass off running across the cabin to my bag. Bad choice, Rachel). But I really can't remember the last time I felt so completely and totally relaxed and altogether spoiled. I can see the appeal of the safari life.

Sunrise and sunset of both days, we went on game drives. It was pretty fascinating to see the animals, but it was really the scenery that killed me. Kenya's Maasai Mara is Serengeti Park on the Tanzanian side of the border, if that gives the name a little more meaning. We're talking rolling grassland, beautiful streams, lone acacia trees on hilltops, rainshowers in the distance... heavenly. The safari trucks would go flying back to camp at sunset, and you could smell the rain on the wind. Anyway, we didn't find any rhinos (the rarest) or cheetahs (though we looked and looked), but we saw plenty of gazelle, topis, impalas, zebras, giraffes, elephants, lions, hyenas, hippos, jackals, hares, foxes, crocodiles, lovely birds, and one very very rare leopard. We also splurged for a night safari where we saw spring hares, mongooses, and an aardvark (also extremely rare), in addition to an unbeLIEVable amount of stars. That poor aardvark. It got chased at very high speeds by two massive Range Rovers, which then crashed through the brush where it took cover, pursuing it for another ten minutes or so. I bet the poor thing will never recover from that experience.

The really glorious part of the trip was that we were in the middle of nowhere. We flew into a little airstrip and drove an hour to reach Talek, the Maasai village near our camp. Maasais are the quintessential African tribe that you see on the cover of National Geographic because they look so exotic. Now their villages are supported mainly through cultural tourism. I don't particularly enjoy being part of that exchange, and I did somewhat regret my decision to go visit a village on our last day there. It felt very intrusive and uncomfortable, though I learned quite a bit. Out in the middle of the Mara, the Maasai lifestyle means paying a bride price of seven cows to marry a circumsized girl of about 14, then buying more wives for your compound as you accumulate cows. Minimal freshwater and minimal electricity in all of Talek... mostly just Maasais in bright red kikois herding cattle. It makes for an intensely beautiful, intensely quiet place.

Anyway, after visiting the Maasai village on Monday morning, we were running a bit late, then stopped to check out a huge herd of elephants on our way to the airport. When we saw the plane flying over us on the way to the airstrip, we took off flying across the bumpy savanna at about 60 miles an hour. As I was sitting in the very back seat of the open-sided Range Rover, this was a mildly terrifying experience, but mostly hilarious. I took a video on my little camera that I'll have to show you all when I'm home. Anyway, we got on the plane and took off about three minutes later. Bit of a close call.

These past few days in bustling Nairobi have been even tougher than the return from Lamu. The fact that I'm buried beneath schoolwork doesn't help, but I really miss that clawed foot bathtub and the feeling of driving across a washboard in a Range Rover at 50 miles an hour. I wouldn't mind too much going back sometime, I must say.