Following 36 hours of traveling (including a pleasant stop in London), four Van Heuvelens, one Sherburne, one Harrison, and one Shoemaker arrived in Nairobi, Kenya, where we decompressed until the next morning's flight to Masai Mara, the northernmost section of the great Serengeti plain. Here we saw elephants, lions, hyenas, gazelles, buffalo, cheetahs, leopards, hippopotami, ostriches, giraffes, crocodiles, and a lot of birds.

The highlights of day one were an early encounter with a lioness and her cubs and a serene evening encounter with one of the Mara's elephant herds.