Log/Pic 64 Blast from the Past 2004

So I started 2004 with a trip to Belize. I spent a week in Placencia at a little guest house. I shared the second floor with a nice family from Belgium. When I wasn't diving, I was chilling in a hammock on the porch staring at the ocean.

I took a couple of buses to Belize City, then a couple of more to the Guatemalan border. I took yet another bus to the largest ruins in North America, Tikal.

In the months of June and July, I went on a trip I had dreamed of since I was a kid, and one I had been planning for several years, a safari in Africa. My friend Tusker had planned this vacation, having been there a hand full of times prior. Punda and Nyani joined us for the trip of a lifetime in Africa's most populous wildlife country, Kenya. As this photo shows, we would rise early each day for a safari at dawn.

One of the first animals we saw was the one I admired most, the elephant.

A male ostrich

A rare black rhino at the edge of Lake Nikuru

Cape Buffalo

Pink Flamingos by the thousands

We visited a Masi Mara tribe. They welcomed us with a display of their traditional high-jumping abilities. Note the huts made of cow dung in the background.

This hyena had a baby in a hole of the rock she was lying on.

Zebras

I ended up enjoying the giraffes the most. Watching them up close as they ate was almost as stunning as watching them gracefully run along the open plains.

A warthog I named Akunamatata

About to climb Longanot Volcano

Mt. Killamanjaro with no cloud cover, very rear.

Lions

Here voltures were eating an antelope.

Hippos

I saw a group of about 150 baboons cutting across the dirt road we were traveling on. Many had babies either clamping onto their bellies or riding them like a horse.

This was the Samburu tribe. They sang to us as we left.

Wild dog

Wildebeest

We watched these three cheetahs for about 45 minutes. They whined for their mother, wrestled and rested.

Towards the end of one day, we witnessed the rare sighting of a leopard cutting across a field. It had in its mouth some sort of deer.

After visiting all the major national parks in Kenya, we ended on the coastal town called Mombasa. We breathed the clean ocean air to help expel the dust in our lungs from the dirt roads we had been traveling on for two weeks. The conditions of these roads took its toll on our bodies and for two days at this five-star resort we just relaxed...when we weren't playing water polo in the pool or scuba diving in the Indian Ocean that is.