Sweetwaters and Amboseli, part II

Guess what, it's my birthday! Hurrah.

The sheer abundance we saw at Sweetwaters is difficult to describe. It's something I never understood was possible until traveling here. Coming from North America, it just doesn't seem, intuitively, to be the way the world should work. Compared to a forest, there seems to be much less vegetation for these multitudes of animals to eat - yet here they are. The key is grass. Grass grows very fast. Thus, although the savannas look like they have much less food than a forest, they actually produce FAR more biomass per year; it's just being eaten right away. Grow, get eaten, grow, get eaten. Such is the life of grass. Most of Africa has two rainy seasons, which means two big growing seasons, and often two rounds of babies. These flat plains, which are dry and brown most of the time, support incredible multitudes of animals. Everywhere we drove - impala, Grant's gazelles, Thomson's gazelles, zebras, giant Cape buffalo, hartebeest, waterbuck... So many of them! And they looked so healthy, as well. The impala had sleek red coats that practically glowed with fat, the robust territorial males presiding arrogantly over their herds, the bachelor males running around butting their gorgeous curved horns against each other. The richness of color was almost overwhelming: brick red impala against brilliantly green grass, saturated with the verdant kiss of rainfall.

Elephants and giraffes, of course. And even some rhinos - we saw three separate individuals during our time at Sweetwaters, I think, which was amazing. Wherever the rhinos are, their guards follow; men hired specifically to keep track of the rhinos. That's how endangered they are. We also had the opportunity to visit a “tame” rhino - I'm not exactly sure of his story, but he was castrated somewhere along the way, and has been tame and in captivity for most of his life. His name is Morani, ironically - the Masai word for a young warrior. It was outrageous. A gamekeeper led us through the giant enclosure that serves as Morani's home, searching here and there to find where our huge grey friend was sleeping. At last he located him, nestled between some low bushes in the sun, like an enormous boulder. An enormous boulder with two enormous, very sharp horns protruding from it.

As we got closer, Morani blew out his breath wearily and regarded us through wrinkly eyes, blinking irritably to get the flies out. Wrinkly, actually, doesn't quite convey the fissures, the crevasses, the deep mud-caked cracks in the hide of this giant creature, whose skin seemed more like sheets of granite than the flimsy pink tissue paper we clothe ourselves in. We crowded around him - I was the first to get right up close and touch his side, the huge slowly-heaving side that seemed like it must be a joke - surely this is a movie prop, a plaster model with a motor inside that makes it move like this, in and out, in and out. He shifted, and our guide warned me nervously to step back in case he rolled over. I can't even imagine being rolled on by Morani - instant pancake, at best. I drew a picture of him, the horn shooting up in the center of the page, amazingly smooth and sharp. A rhino's horn is actually made of hair, specialized hair that grows and molds together, sharpened by the animal as it rubs it against rocks, much as we would sharpen a knife against a whetstone.

We also saw lions. We'd all been dying for lions - we'd ask every day, and Justine was starting to feel antsy about not producing any, so at last we got out the radio tracker and went after them, following the faint signal of the strangely old-fashioned device; a large staticky box in a leather holder, with a giant rubber antenna that Greg held out of the top of the Landrover. We followed the signal to a group of three lions, two of them with large radio collars on. We spotted them suddenly, directly in front of the Land rover, and I realized I hadn't properly understood that this strange clicking box was going to lead me to lions. Real lions. Lions that didn't care about our Land rover at all - didn't care about anything unless it were prey, because nothing poses a threat to a lion. There's no cause for concern at the sight of humans, or any other beast. As we watched them, practically holding our breath at the wonder of it, they paced through the windy field and gazed impassively across the landscape, the lithe powerful muscles of their shoulders bunching and falling with each languid step. Have you ever looked in a lion's eyes? They're completely golden, adapted to reflect light at night and to slit their pupils near-shut to block out sun, pure pools of tawny gold. They lay in the grass and groomed each other, eyes squeezed shut as their partner's tongue raked over their face, necking with a tenderness that was quite at odds with the huge fangs revealed when they yawned.