Last drive in Kenya

This blog is for today. Eventually I'll send yesterdays. 

We started the day seeing baboons, which were running through a local schoolyard. The school looks like it has maybe 50 students and they looked like they were kindergarten to 8th grade. The teachers and kids had to stomp and scare the baboons away. Next we saw two hippos. 

I know we're not supposed to body shame but....

 Then we saw a small but still amazing wildebeest crossing. 

Such perseverance, such dust. The place of the crossing, the Mara river, had 2 crocodiles and many hippos 

Then, our guide, found a male lion with a female and 2 other males.  It was in the prime of its life span. It was laying next to a female and there was an older male with lots of scars by it's eye nearby. Then the guide realized that the lion was mating and we saw it! They mate many times a day for about four days    When the female was done she swatted the male off  . It was interesting to see the behaviors and see how the older and younger male lions interacted with each other. Our guide thinks they were brothers or maybe cousins. 

Next we found a mama cheetah with four very young cubs the size of a house cat. The cubs were playing and the mama watched over them, calling them back when they got too far from her. That was pretty spectacular.

We continued on and found a freshly killed wildebeest with 4 lions eating it!  It wasn't as gory as I was hoping, but it was still very cool. Very wild. 

 In the afternoon we went on the lookout for cheetahs and leopards but only found two young male cheetahs - asleep. They did not care about us and barely moved during the 20 minutes we watched them. After that a large storm was clearly headed our way so we hightailed it back to camp. 

But not before seeing a pair elephants in a minor fight, we weren't very close and one was much bigger than the other.  Then when we had almost made it back to camp we came across a large elephant herd and stopped to watch them. They had some young elephants with them and the king elephant let us know that we were too close by flapping his ears. 

We quickly moved back so they could cross the road only to see the tiniest baby elephant with the biggest ears  It was very cool.

Tomorrow we move to another camp so you won't hear from me 

Melanie