In Kenya, Wide-Eyed and Wide Awake
Jan 25th, 2010 by wwftravel
On the plains of Kenya, you never know who's outside your tent providing an early-morning wake-up call ...
Stacy Fiorentinos has been on dozens of wildlife safaris, but she remembers the first night she slept on the plains of Africa as if it happened last night, not 22 years ago.
Stacy was on her first outing in the Maasai Mara Reserve in southwestern Kenya. She spent the day rumbling across the dusty savannah in a four-wheel drive vehicle following a dizzying number of zebras and wildebeest. She had dinner at her camp and retired early to her private, canvas-walled tent, thinking sleep would come easily because of jetlag.
Not a chance.
Despite the cozy amber glow of a bedside lamp and the comfortable, full-size bed draped in the softest of blankets, Stacy said she couldn’t sleep. The sounds of the savannah kept her, like many first-timers on safari, wide-eyed, exhilarated and, admittedly, “a little bit petrified.”
Through the echoing chorus of frogs singing in the surrounding bush in the middle of the night, she heard heavy footsteps immediately outside her tent. She lay in bed, fully dressed, stiff as a board, clutching a flashlight.
“OK, this is it. This is it. This is a lion. I’m sure of it,” Stacy recalls now, with a laugh. “It dawned on me that I’m in the middle of the bush, and only a piece of cloth is protecting me from this lion.”
Actually, it turned out that “that piece of cloth” was protecting her from a few harmless waterbucks. They were taking a late-night stroll through camp, her guide told her as they investigated their footprints in the dust the next morning.
It's common to hear footsteps just footsteps from your bed.
Having gone on more than 30 safaris throughout Africa over the years, Stacy—who today plans safaris, including some of WWF’s tours, as president and founder of the tour operator Classic Escapes—says that very few travel experiences anywhere in the world can top a first night’s sleep on the African plains, no matter how much—or how little—sleep you get.
“I’m used to hearing night noise, but nothing can prepare you for how mesmerizing it is to sleep out there,” she said. “If I don’t go at least once a year, I go through withdrawal.”
Travel with WWF to Kenya: June 3-14, 2010 or November 3-14, 2010.
