Kenya: Homesick

I'll start out with a trailer featuring some of the best footage I was able to capture on this trip. Excuse the cheesy iMovie format! For more wildlife photos from this trip, check out the Photo Gallery.

Back in August of 2018 I had the trip of a lifetime. I went on a week-long safari in Kenya. I don’t even know how to express the beauty I beheld. I took advantage of the fact that I would be in Nairobi for a primate conference and decided to hang out for a week afterward with some cool primatologists! I always thought that if I ever made it to Africa, it would be as a scientist. And, I was basically right. While I wasn’t doing research on the two occasions I went to the continent, I was participating in professional development as a workshop participant (Cameroon) or presenting research (Kenya).

Experiencing local Masai culture. Photo Credit: Jessica W. Lynch

I had no expectation for what I would see upon landing in Nairobi. I had travelled more than 23 hours over 8,000 miles (>12,000km) to get there. I was exhausted but excited. Nairobi was a huge sprawling city with huge billboards and tons of traffic. It was too dark to see much that night but over the next few days I would notice the colorful and musical transit vans, the vendors selling everything from bananas to wrist watches weaving between cars during red lights, the red dust that lightly coated everything (even in the city), the aggressive driving, the marks of colonialism amidst the local flare. It was complex, beautiful, boisterous, sad, humbling, intense, rich and poor.

Quite an interesting way to transport live poultry.

I love this photo, everyone looks like they're in motion. This was taken at a scenic overlook of the Rift Valley. Photo Credit: Jessica W. Lynch

​I arrived at the Airbnb I'd share with another postdoc after what seemed like another hour of driving. I hadn’t really known what to expect from the pictures which I was happy to find didn’t do it justice. I was greeted at the front door by a beautiful, sweet dog and shortly afterward by her charming and glamorous owner. Nikki was a stylish blond woman, about my height, who worked at the UN Headquarters in Nairobi, where as it happens, the conference was taking place. She had the loveliest British accent and I was immediately taken in by her personality. As exhausted as I was, I only had time to tell her “hello, nice to meet you, my luggage hasn’t arrived” before I crashed on a super comfy bed. 
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The next morning, Nikki had already been on the phone with the airport searching for my delayed bag. Turns out, it was lost somewhere between Chicago and London. For the next four days I would be rotating the outfit I arrived in with the conference t-shirt I got at registration and pair of black leggings borrowed from Nikki. I made due while I spent those days describing the contents of my bag to the airline and stifling the urge to scream “WTF?!” into the phone. Eventually, mostly because Nikki is awesome, my bag arrived bright and early on the 5th day at her front door.

The infamous suitcase that almost didn't make it. Behind it, a new friend has perched.

This blurry photo of a pied crow is not the best, but for some reason I love it. It's kind of eerie, in motion. I took this outside the window of the AirBnB.

Souvenir shopping and making connections. Photo Credit: Jessica W. Lynch

By that point, I had given my talk at the conference and done all the networking I was capable of. I met some cool new people, and reconnected with some colleagues, best of all my advisor Jessica from graduate school. I’m going to gloss over the conference as it wasn’t nearly as awesome as everything else I got to do. But the closing banquet was pretty awesome, with all kinds of local food, entertainment and dancing. I won’t lie, I was really excited for work to be over and to start looking for animals. I had already seen Blue monkeys on the grounds of the UN but no pictures are allowed. I was itching to try my new camera lens which I had bought specifically for this occasion.

Old and new friends at the International Primate Conference. Photo Credit: Jessica W. Lynch

​My fist adventure was organized by the conference. I got to visit a Karura forest, a fragment within the city limits of Nairobi located directly behind the UN grounds. Jessica and I went on a guided tour to find colobus monkeys with a local primate researcher, Mary. We found them but they eluded my camera. Colobus are incredibly shy monkeys that when detected engage in a freezing behavior where they remain motionless until the danger passes. It was great just seeing them though. We stayed for a while catching glimpses of movement here and there at the very tops of the canopy. We got hungry while we waited and snacked on granola bars which attracted a large male blue monkey that we had to ward off with a stick. At that point we decided to start making our way back to the conference and stopped for lunch at the café located within the park. That day and the next I saw a myriad of beautiful birds and mammals with local primatologists Mary and John as guides: blue monkeys, colobus, suni antelopes, bushbucks, sunbirds, weavers, turacos, bee-eaters, thrushes, mouse birds, flycatchers, wagtails, manakins and ibises. The fragment was beautiful and they were doing a lot of great work there, restoring native plants, relocating colobus monkeys, maintaining trails where local people walked, ran or biked to waterfalls and caves.

Suni Antelope hiding in the brush.

The blue monkey that wanted our snacks. Look at those teeth!

Snapping photos of monkeys while talking to our primatologist guide, Mary. Photo Credit: Jessica W. Lynch

The coolest thing about Nairobi are these carefully maintained tracts of wilderness in the middle of city. While in the park, you can see the trains going by and the highway traffic at the peripheries. You don’t have to leave this sprawling urban center to find breathtaking wildlife. In addition to Karura forest, there is Nairobi National Park which boasts lions, water buffalo, all manner of birds (storks, ibises, spoonbills, ducks, kites, doves, etc), rhinos, giraffes, bats and zebras. And I got to see them all! In fact, in this park I saw many iconic African species for the first time in the wild. Getting to and around the park was an interesting process. We commissioned a taxi (yes, a regular taxi) to drive us around to look at animals. I was surprised at first, but Stephen (our driver) was an incredible guide and made it possible for us to see more than I’d imagined. The highlight was probably the pair of rhinos we saw with their baby! Also, I was pleasantly surprised that we hardly saw other vehicles while inside the park. Only for the rhinos were there a couple other jeeps; and only a large gathering occurred for the lions. That was my first time seeing any big cat in the wild (wait no...there was that puma in Brazil in 2015)! And it was huge deal, because like many kids who grow up wanting to be zoologist, I was a big cat fiend, with a particular predilection for tigers. But the lions were no less impressive, there were at least eight of them – some napped in the shade of a tree while a few others fed on the carcass of some poor artiodactyl. All in all, it was one of the most beautiful days I’ve ever spent inside a city.

Rolling up on hippos like its no big thing. Photo Credit: Jessica W. Lynch

​Now, I always thought that safaris were for rich foreigners, and I pretty much still do. While I am a foreigner in Kenya, I am certainly not rich! This trip took a lot of saving and strategic credit card use but it was certainly worth it. Our first stop on the tour of non-urban east African wildlife was Lake Naivasha. We were guided by Francis who taught us a Swahili phrase, sawa sawa, which we were to use when we ready to move on.  It was here, that I experienced for the first time the exhilarating fear of being in close (enough) proximity to one of the most dangerous animals in the world – hippos. While we did see the notoriously aggressive water buffalo in Nairobi National Park, I did not feel the same surge of adrenaline as I did while approaching this aquatic mal-tempered heavy weight in a motor boat. We also sighted kingfishers and cormorants, fishing eagles, water bucks and wildebeest. On that same day, I got to visit Hell’s Gate National Park where in addition to beautiful animals like warthogs, gazelles and zebras we saw gorgeous gorges and felt the hottest water I’ve ever encountered in nature thanks to the geothermal activity manifested in hot springs and geysers.

A tower in Hell's Gate.

Taking a leisurely stroll through Hell's Gate. Photo Credit: Jessica W. Lynch

​The next leg of the trip was probably my favorite. The Masai Mara is rightly famous for seeing incredible wildlife: Baboons, meerkats, jackals, elephants, cheetahs, hyenas, hornbills, ostriches, vultures, crocodiles. The river there has been featured in countless nature documentaries, one of the most memorable scenes being the wildebeest crossing during migration trying to avoid the crocodiles looking to score a meal. I was fortunate to see most of the big five, except for the elusive leopard! The entire time there was exciting. from seeing beautiful cultural displays by the native Masai people to the heart stopping grunts of hippos and giggling of hyenas seemingly right outside our tents at night.
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​​Between the last destination and Masai Mara, we spent the night at a quaint hotel, Thayu Farm. It was a beautiful set of cottages with inviting fireplaces and a menu that was 100% supplied by the farm on location. Eric kindly guided us to the nearby tea farm in the morning, one of the largest (if not the largest) in Kenya. It was an interesting experience and I was able to buy my dad a bag of tea as a souvenir directly from the source. Then we were off to our next natural encounter.

Surveying his domain.

Posing on the bridge over the Mara River. Photo Credit: Jessica W. Lynch

Kipipiri forest is in an area with extensive degradation and suffers from complex conservation issues. The local people need to make a living, and typically do so by carving out a piece of land from the forest to cultivate crops. It is often difficult to reconcile the needs of people and protection of the environment. That is what Peter Njagi, a Kenyan primatologist, focuses his work on. With a team of local field techs, he works with the local people to help ensure the recovery and preservation of the forest and particularly colobus monkeys. He has overseen relocation projects for these primates in areas like Kipipiri and Karura forest, the fragment behind the UN that I mentioned earlier. With his help and that of the field techs, we saw several groups of this beautiful species, just far enough to make capturing photos difficult. Immediately following out time in Kipipiri, we visited Soysambu Conservancy. This was one more chance to revel in the beauty of Kenya and learn about conservation efforts in the rift valley area. Thanks to a large lake located in the conservancy, there were tons of birds including pelicans, flamingos, ducks and plovers. We got more good views of colobus monkey and black-backed jackals. We even saw a new ungulate species, the eland.

Spotting colobus monkeys across the valley in Kipipiri. Photo Credit: Cecilia Veracini

A black and white colobus keeps his distance in Soysambu.

​Obviously, my trip to Kenya was an incredible, life-changing dream come true. I probably have not articulated the pure happiness that I felt in every moment I was privileged to spend there. Even those first days in dirty travel clothes. I was ecstatic even when I was frustrated, tired, hungry, lost. I was welcomed so fully, I rarely felt like just a tourist. On more than one occasion a local said “welcome home” after learning I was actually American. And when I left, it felt like leaving home. Kenya, I'm homesick.