(Published June 12, 2022) The photo album of the day will be Celia experiencing Kenya with a few of her favorite friends…first though a small look at where we are right this very minute of our lucky lives.

You know how I love rain, so I am not complaining that our game drive is rained out this evening. Actually we’ve been caught out in one wild rainstorm, with rainy evenings and bright wet mornings often in these last days. It’s the end of the rainy season here so to be expected. We’re at our last Basecamp Masai Mara site, Leopard Hill, for two nights before moving on to Uganda. There are three camp sites: Basecamp Explorer, Eagle View, and Leopard Hill, all environmentally-conscience at every step of the way, but the architecture of the tents and other guest facilities gets a little more awesome at each site; by Leopard Hill there are several additional luxuries such as reading lamps, a hair dryer, grand bathroom, and roof that opens to the stars. The design of the tents here incorporates a kind of wilderness elegance; they’re round with a middle station of varnished wood separating beds and the toilet and shower rooms. Ruggedly handsome old chests, a pillow-crowded couch and colorful Masai-woven blankets complete the smart and comfortable ambiance. Much more about all three sites and their inhabitants later.

Celia, my friend from our days as executive directors of VSA arts organizations, is indeed an experienced traveler. Perhaps not in as many countries as I’ve checked off my list, but with more depth to her exploration of many of them. This is her first African trip, and she is determined to savor every single moment. Fortunately, being a true extrovert, that is probably more doable than for those of my introverted ilk. Celia’s the kind of person where, by the time you’ve returned from a restroom break, knows interesting facts about half of the other people in the room. Her friendly inquisitiveness, more importantly, means she’s mightily interested in all of the wildlife we encounter—including guesses about their personal lives! She has the key characteristics of all good travelers—an unfailing generosity of spirit and huge curiosity. She has gone a bit overboard with the wildebeest however, also known as the gnu…an odd-appearing beast with a language to match—which Celia attempts to imitate numerous times a day. We’ve decided it’s a combination of an air horn and a buzzer (she’s remarkably good at it!) She also has a surplus of Gnu jokes—don’t even ask for one of those.

Here’s a poem I found just for Celia. “The Implausibility of Gnus” by Dylan Carpenter. (Wallace Stevens Journal, spring 2019)

Each time the implausibility

Of gnus would gallop past

The wiry thorn trees under which

The black-backed jackals massed,

The air would tense, the earth would shake,

The rattlesnakes would shed

Their flaky, diamond-banded skin

And swarm a copperhead.

Once, the black-backed jackals dashed

Out from the thorn tree stand

And chased the implausibility

Of gnus from the desert land

And thus the implausibility

Of gnus stopped galloping past

The fractal thorn trees under which

The black-backed jackals massed.

I asked Celia for a first comment on her time in the Masai Mara. Here, lightly paraphrased: “I always dreamed of Africa and what it would be like…and here I am and the gold of the Mara stretching before us and lavender hues of sunsets, is just as I imagined…what I didn’t foresee was that crafty little baboon sneaking into my room and stealing my banana!”