Masai Mara, Kenya IV

Thursday, March 8, 2001

Masai Mara, Kenya IV

Early in the afternoon, the air thickens, and dark clouds build toward critical mass. A lion and lioness nap through the day’s torpid heat, taking what shade the tall savanna grass affords. Lightning crackles and as if a switch has been thrown, the air turns to liquid.

The pair look as happy as any wet house cat and the temperature drops 20 degrees in as many minutes.

As the rain falls, the road system, such as it is, turns into a thick muddy stew. Matatu drivers are no great skill under the best of circumstances, turn the park into a demolition derby, careening in the slick mud and burying themselves to the axle. I make friends for life with a Japanese couple by offering a rope to extricate their driver’s minivan out of a rut. They speed off into the gloom in a spray of mud. I stay with the lions for a few minutes more, watching as lightning spits from the receding storm clouds.

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INTRODUCTION

For much of my adult life, I have been lucky enough to get paid doing the things I love most. My work as a itinerant travel and wildlife photographer has sent me around the world and across all seven continents.

Over the last two decades, I have had ample opportunity to appreciate the absurdities of life on the road, having once spent 27 memorable hours during my first trip to Kenya digging a bogged safari truck out using only a sauce pan. In addition to my work in Africa, I have traveled extensively in Alaska, Australia, Antarctica and Asia.

I hope to work my way through the rest of the alphabet in a timely fashion.

Each year, I spend five or six months on the road. Along the way, I try to make time to scribble something in my notebooks. More often than not, it’s about whatever mishap has befallen me on any particular day. This collection offers a random sample from those journals, notebooks and emails.