I'm in love

Friday was just another normal day of class. We got up, went on a nature walk for Wildlife Ecology class, had lunch, and then went on safari. Ain't no thing like a chicken wing.

At the gate of Amboseli National Park, we opened up the roof windows of our Land Cruisers (one for each of the three back rows), kicked off our shoes, and stood up on our seats, now ready with our binoculars, cameras, notebooks, and field guides for some animal observation.

We saw ostriches, impala, wildebeest, gazelle (Thomson's and Grant's), elephants, an oryx, wart hogs (they look exactly like Pumba from The Lion King, which, incidentally, means wart hog), hyenas, giraffe, buffalo, zebras, hippos, and lions, among others. I got a bruise on my life side from where I was leaning against the opening of the roof, but that didn't matter--we were zooming around wide open spaces.

Having grown up in New York City surrounded by tall buildings, what struck me most was all of that wide open space and blue, blue sky. We zoomed through the roads, wind whipping through the planes, stirring up my hair into awful knots and coating it in dust. Grasslands, barelands, wetlands, wooded lands, dry lands, swamplands, we passed through it all. Freedom in the watchful eye of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

And there were the animals. If I thought that we saw a lot of ostrich and wildebeest and zebra close to the entrance of the park, that was nothing to the immense volume of animals we saw at the swamps (which were really just more like watering holes) that are the park's lifeline. Around the water were grazing literally thousands of animals, mixed in peacefully together while the water glittered blue and white in the hot sun. A Maasai herded his sheep and goats (or shoats as they're called here) through the mass of wild animals, while elephants and hippos reposed deep in the waters.

It was the most amazing feeling. And truthfully, my mind kept casting itself back to The Lion King, which really was my only reference point for anything on this scale. I didn't need my iPod, "The Circle of Life" kept playing itself through my head. Something about that song really does capture the rhythm of the life out there.

Wonderful.