Page 5 of Worlds Apart
“Not bad.”
“That’s great! It’s a long flight from Washington, I know.” He smiled broadly. “I’m Trevor. Welcome to Nairobi.”
* * *
The pilot’scalm voice crackled through the speaker of the small propeller plane, her crisp Indian accent narrating their descent. “And for those departing at the Mara North airstrip, this is our last stop before returning to Nairobi.” The plane circled around a dusty dirt track cleared from the grassy savannah.
They leveled out and bounced across the dirt airstrip, kicking up dust as half a dozen trucks and land cruisers began to follow the dirt road running parallel to the plane. Along the edge of the cleared area, there was a tall stand of trees and Sunny did a double take as she realized that the tall things moving at the edge of the trees weren’t more trees, but a small herd of giraffes.
Wow.
“Those are giraffes.” She blinked, but they were still there.
Wow!
“Welcome to the Mara,” the pilot said again. “We hope you enjoy your stay.”
Sunny was frozen, watching the herd of giraffes through her small window, until the pilot called out. “You know, there’s more if you get off the plane.”
She blinked and turned away from the window. “Right.” She felt her face warming. “Sorry.”
The woman smiled. “Have a great time. Your first visit to Kenya?”
Sunny swallowed her nerves. “First visit anywhere.”
“Fantastic!” The woman’s eyes lit up. “You came to the best place.”
Sunny grabbed her backpack and bent over as she exited the plane, her eyes immediately met by the glaring Mara sunshine.
“Sunny!”
She squinted and turned to Alice’s familiar voice, spotting her friend near a large safari-style truck.
“Alice!” She ran toward her, then stopped. “My bag!”
The man with Alice waved a hand. “I’ll get it.”
Alice enveloped Sunny in a massive hug. “I can’t believe you’re really here! When I invited you, I never thought you’d come.”
Sunny laughed a little. “I’m kind of shocked myself.”
“No.” Alice took her by the shoulders and shook her a little. “This is excellent. You have an adventurous spirit; it’s time that you came out of your shell.”
“Okay.” She let out a quick breath and looked up at the massive off-road vehicle they were standing by. “So how do I climb into this thing?”
* * *
Sunny’s cameranever left her face the entire way to the camp. Herds of zebras and gazelles lined both sides of the dirt road. The driver, John, stopped dead when she squealed from the backseat of the Land Cruiser.
“That’s an elephant!” There was an elephant rubbing its side on a tree and shaking the canopy with its scratches. “Oh my god, Alice, that’s an elephant!”
Alice laughed. “Yes, you’ll see a lot of those.”
The Land Cruiser started again, and Sunny decided then and there that she wasn’t going to be embarrassed by any of her reactions on this trip.
She’d seen an elephant. That was amazing! Her mind drifted to the percentage of people in the world who had seen a living elephant in the wild. It couldn’t have been that large.
“The Mara North is a private conservation project,” Alice was telling her about the camp. “The Maasai landowners in the area pooled their property together and manage their grazing along the edges of the park, leaving the majority of the land wild habitat.”
