Short Stories

Certain people who shall remain anonymous (CoughCharMooreCough) have been pester^H^H^H^H^H^Hnicely asking me for pictures of my time in Kenya. In this case, the pictures require stories to be told, and I just don't have the time or space for all of them. And I also have to punch some of them up a bit, because the lighting wasn't the greatest while we were in the Mara.

I should also take a moment to officially announce Abracadafrica, my blog of the Kenya trip. Visit it if you'd like. It has more blow-by-blow recollections from the trip, some commentary that didn't make it into my personal journal, and will also include some pictures as well. Sorry if I'm spoiling that experience for you.

So far, pretty much everyone's favorite pictures are of the elephants. Especially the baby ones. It really has reinforced my theory that anything smaller than it should be is generally considered cute, regardless of how ugly it might actually be. I'm sure if someone created a miniature bull-dog it would be an instant hit.

We also saw some cheetahs. While the one displayed isn't the most telling, we saw a mother with five cubs (large for cubs, but young nonetheless). They were playing on a nearby Land Cruiser. I'll blog more about that later. The thing that really stood out to me about cheetahs is that they can accelerate from 0-70mph (0-110kph) in about two seconds. Using Wikipedia figures of about an average of 52kg for an adult cheetah, that means they experience roughly 1.5 gees of acceleration when running. By contrast, my back-of-the-envelope calculation says that Ted Ginn, Jr. experiences roughly 0.23 gees of acceleration when he runs the 40m dash. And he makes everyone look slow. For those not paying attention, a cheetah can accelerate roughly 7.5 times faster than a US-record-holder sprinter can.

We also saw a lot of lions. They're cute and cuddly as cubs, and they will rip your face off later in life. They're also no slouch as runners—L told me that his car was rushed by a lion once, and it closed the distance so fast that he didn't have time to depress the clutch. That was a "Note to self: buy plastic pants" type of day. The lions we saw were mostly pretty docile, though we were thisclose to seeing a lion take on a buffalo. That was one of the most tense moments in recent memory. I was literally afraid to take a picture, silently willing myself to aid the lion's concentration as much as possible.

We also saw THOUSANDS of wildebeest. It's the Great Migration time, so they're leaving Kenya for Tanzania in droves. This is one of the reasons we saw so many lions in the Mara. There were lots of zebra in here, too. From a distance, they looked like little bushes dotting the countryside. Except that they moved. Wildebeest are not particularly smart and provide ready and suitable fodder for hunters.

We saw other animals, too—giraffes, bush bucks, eland and other sorts of gazelle, mongeese (they'll take on snakes that'll kill a man in thirty seconds—Rikki-Tikki-Tavi anyone?), and so on.

The other interesting item of note was time spent in the slums of Kibera. They're pretty dirty. The area is extremely poverty-stricken. I guess it's hard to qualify the people as "happy," but the sort of urban depression I associate with inner city Philadelphia or Detroit doesn't seem to have taken hold there. L told me it was because they were too poor to think about anything but survival. I didn't see any of the residential area of Kibera, so I don't know if my perceptions are really all that accurate; as I tell others, it's always dangerous to sample a curve too sparsely. But I can say that the people I met there were mostly very receptive.


So that's a couple weeks compressed into roughly two events and some pictures. I'll be writing more here, of course, but I expect most Africa-related things will go in the other blog. Once pictures are available online, I'll mention it.