Even on the other side of the world we know about the U.S. federal government shutdown. The cable news stations love that story, and have for weeks — especially on days when no global natural disaster has presented itself for our delectation. The potential default of the U.S. national debt also has been talked about, […]

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Air travel has become crude and brutish over the past few decades. It has gotten worse in nearly every regard. But not on every front. Planes are safer. They seem to go more places. And the big one: The multi-media platforms most of the big and/or new planes have. Most of the movies I watch […]

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We were riding in the Land Cruiser over the broad and grassy uplands of the Masai Mara, looking for a leopard, when we saw a tent-like structure on the horizon. What could that be, out in the middle of the game conservancy? A watering station for some truly exotic creatures who would be traversing the […]

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Six days that flashed past … but seemed jammed with enough events and experiences to last for weeks. A first visit to Africa, and to Kenya. A day in Nairobi, one week after the terror attack at Westgate Mall. Then four days in the astonishing Masai Mara Conservancy, we woke to hippos bellowing in the […]

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  People ride around in Land Cruisers, with guides, here in the Masai Mara, sharing the same upland plains with all manner of creatures, great and small, harmless and lethal, and it doesn’t take long to think you’re in a sort of zoo, where the chances of you being harmed are remarkably low — unless […]

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It was a compulsion that seemed to suffuse the afternoon safari fleet, here in Kenya’s Masai Mara conservancy. “Let’s find a leopard.” It made sense, at least for the six of us riding, again, with our guides, Ashford and Wilson, because the day before we had seen four of the Big Five. The missing fifth? […]

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The idea of safari resorts, like this one in the Masai Mara, in Kenya, is Land Cruisers out on the savanna, a half-dozen tourists with cameras, binoculars and bush hats, a guide/driver … and the big animals of Africa. Even if we concede that Kenya’s tourist industry is geared to assure we see as many […]

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Our room — a tent, actually — is located on Hippo Corner. Or at least that is what operators call it, here at the Fairmont Mara Safari Club in the Masai Mara. On the balcony of this particular tent, a person can look down the 50 feet or so to the Mara River, and see […]

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Yes. We are in Kenya’s capital. Site of the terror attacks at the city’s biggest mall last week. I prefer to think it isn’t as brazen as it may seem, from the western side of the Atlantic. Isn’t it generally safest right after a major attack? And wouldn’t it take a few weeks for a […]

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