Jump like a Maasai & give good blue steel

A few weeks ago I posted a story about the Maasai women from the village of the school I worked at in Tanzania. Here's the follow up -  of the men, who were so kind to us & showed us what it's really like to witness a local Maasai celebration. 

Before you scratch your head, yeah some of the guys have scars on their faces. I asked about this, and apparently it's a marking put onto elders, teachers & leaders. So if you look carefully you might see some of the younger guys with them on their cheeks & foreheads. This is because we had a dance teacher & a teacher of Maasai youth in the group.

The chief is the dude who has the cataract eyes & the leather vest under his robes. There's an up close pic of him further down. He was super friendly to me, but I have to tell you he is very intimidating in person. And super charismatic. Like a BOSS. Fitting I guess! I actually was afraid to ask for a picture; normally I'm totally fine with this kind of thing, but there's something about his stance which says 'don't mess with me'. But he willingly posed...I even got a smile out of him! Usually, he's all about the Blue Steel (seems they're all pretty good at it though- they must be taught to master it)

It's incredible to see these guys in full flight. And flying it is. They jump so high it seems to defy gravity. They've even engineered some whizz bang rubber footwear as shock absorbers, made from old car tyres.

I ended up taking some video footage too, so maybe one day I'll get the patience to shift through it all & edit it into something sharable. 

The first of the Big 5... but the baby ones are SO cute!!!

Have you ever tried to photograph one of these things up close? Yeah, me either. But I learnt that you can't fit a whole one on into your standard 75mm lens when they are that close. So I was screwed. They were either too far (hence the lens) or WAY too close. You just get elephant eye-cam. Not so pleasant. So, while I have a lot of photos of elephants in this post, I can assure you there's about a hundred more in my filing system which will never see the light of day. But enough about that. Onto the elephants...

What an impressive creature. The first thing we saw as soon as we got into the Serengeti was evidence of these guys. Their poo is about the size of a rockmelon. Eeew. Good news, it doesn't small since it's just grass. Win.

We were really luck and saw loads of these guys; bulls, females with babies & my personal favourite... a visit to our overnight camping grounds by two giant bulls who decided to take water from our campsite well. Yeah, it was 9pm at night and we were enjoying a glass or two of Konyagi (Tanzanian rum/vodka poison) when we hear this rustling sound about 5 meters away. So we go inspect. In hindsight, I'm not sure that's a wise thing to do in the middle of an african safari - but the Konyagi made us do it. Our inspection leads to an up close & personal encounter with these wild animals. I've never felt so small and fragile in my life. My headlamp torch shone directly into the eye of the biggest one; he didn't like that so much. But in the end (after I froze like a deer in headlights), we left them alone to their drinking while we sat & watched them from our dinner table under the stars. Happiness for everyone involved.