The Maasai Mara Part 1

To get to the Maasai Mara, we needed to go to an air strip in a town near Samburu. The plane was not very big but we went in a smaller one to Amboseli. It was cool to watch out the window and see how the area changed. I mean with the trees the color of everything that we saw. Since we were so close to the ground we could see animals running around and playing and living their life not knowing we could see them.

When we landed in the Mara, there were animals all around us. From the looks of it, I think that the animals thought we were just some other weird animal, the plane that is. Our guide in the Mara's name was Nixon. He was a Masai. In his vehicle he had some beverages for us.
 
The Mara was the coolest place we went to. And it was my favorite, we were there for three days. We stayed in tents that were right in front of the river were many hippos were. It was a beautiful place to stay at and the service was nice, the food was good, you could see animals across the river from your room or the dining area, and I had my birthday there. The Mara was the only place that we were not by ourselves on our drives. There was one other couple with us.

We took our first game drive in the Mara at four o'clock in the afternoon. It was unlike any of the other places, where we had to look so very hard to find one animal at a time, where in the Mara, we could not go ten minutes without seeing hundreds of Wildebeast or Zebras or any Gazelles and birds.

 Road block, Wildebeast style.

Thomson's Gazelle

 We also saw a lot of Topi which are what you see here.

Zebras playing

We were driving along looking for anything we could see, when Nixon, our guide, spotted one lioness behind a rock a little ways away. It was deciding if it wanted to try to take on a buffalo or not, so we watched it for a while, but it did not do anything, it was still interesting to watch though. We left the lioness and went to look for something else. We only went about two minutes when we found two male Hyenas laying down. They look surprisingly a lot like dogs.

This is Nixon

We left the Hyenas and started heading back to the camp, which was called Karen Blixen camp.

That was the end of our first day.
I will write about our second day next time.

Sweetwaters Camp

Hey everyone

Today I am talking about Sweetwaters in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy. We only stayed for one night but we wished we could of stayed longer but it was still nice to stay there. Right out side of our tent there was a water hole where many animals would come and drink the water there. The Warthogs were fun to watch eat, they stick their butts in the air and munch away on the grass.

When we got to the place we had lunch, and sitting or standing right out side the window of the restaurant, was a Maribou, which is like a mix between a Stork and a Vulture.

 And then after lunch, I got to go on a Camel ride. It was fun, but mine was being a bad boy, he kept stopping to eat leaves and he started to run one time.

At four in the afternoon we went out for a game drive. Before we actually started we went to a Rhino sanctuary and a Chimpanzee sanctuary. The Rhino was a blind black one, so he had to be kept in captivity so it could live longer than it would of in the wild on it's own. His name was Baraka.

 We didn't see much at Sweetwaters but we were glad of what we saw. But we did see vultures eating a dead giraffe and lots of gazelles and some giraffes and an elephant.

The next morning we got up and went to the town that was nearby so we could fly to the Maasai Mara. As a matter of fact that is what I will be writing about next.

Samburu the first place we went

Hi everyone,
Samburu was the first place we went after we stayed the night in Nairobi. In case you did not know, Nairobi is the capital of Kenya. We got to Nairobi late at night and we needed to get up early in the morning to get to Samburu. The drive was six hours. Half of it was bumpy roads so it was a bit annoying after a while. We finally arrived in time for lunch. 

Amazed by the beauty and the nature of the place, we walked through with monkeys all around us and many different beautiful birds. At the lunch area, or the dining area, there were two of the local Samburu men that were scaring away the monkeys with their slingshots and using them so the monkeys don't steal any food from the kitchen or from peoples plates.

 It was an enjoyable meal with the scenery and all the stuff around us that's going on at that moment.

At four o'clock, in the afternoon, of course, we went out for our first game drive. At first we did not see anything but birds, but then we started to see a lot of Impalas, dik diks, and other antelope and gazelles. But then we saw the one thing we thought we would not see, a cheetah. 

The next day we saw some water buffalo over by the river, a warthog, a huge herd of oryx and some elephants and three reticulated giraffes. The stay was good, but we did not see that many animals, or at least as many as we thought we would. 
On our way out of Samburu, we stopped by the local village to visit for a little.
The people danced for us sang some of their songs and showed us around their village. It was fun to see all the people and the way they live.

Next I will be writing about Sweet Waters, where we stayed for only one night.

Kenya

Hi everyone sorry I have not written in so long I was busy with stuff I needed to do and plus, I got to go to Kenya for 2 weeks and it was fun and even more amazing than you can imagine. We first went to a place called Samburu which was a in a tropical sort of place which had monkeys and a few antelope called Kudu that came around every once and a while. I kept a journal so I wouldn't forget about everything. All the animals are:

• Wildebeast all over in the Masai Mara because of the great migration
• Zebras same thing as the wildebeast
• Giraffes
• baboons
• Rhinos
• Chimps
• Elands
• Topis
• Elephants
• buffalo
• monkeys
• dik diks
• impalas
• thomsan's gazelles
• grants gazelles
• hippos
• crocodiles
• vultures
• eagles
• secretary bird
• ostriches
• cheetahs
• lions
• hyenas
• mongoose
• jackals
• hartebeast
• oryx
• maribou
• warthogs
• storks
• spoon bills
• and much more

and many birds that were beautiful in color and that we saw many times so we could appreciate how pretty they were.

 This is Wafula--does he look familiar? I was given an African tribal name by a Kenyan man I met. It means Rainy Season which is a good time for Africa. It is a time when everything grows and animals are nourished.

This is only the intro to everything. My next blog entry will be about the first days in Samburu National Reserve.

Flying Baseball Runner

Be sure to watch the whole thing because this is fuuuuuuuuuuuuny. I think I'll try this sometime.

A Fortunate Series of Events

Hi People
I don't have school this week so we're just staying home and doing things as a family We can't do anything big because we're saving up money to go to Kenya this summer.

Two days ago we decided we were going to this sculpture garden, Queen Califia. and I got to bring a friend so I chose my best friend Kurt. We picked up Kurt and left to go. It took a while to get there and Kurt and I got bored in the back seat. When we finally got there, we went into the park and we saw all these different totem pole type things

and a huge dome in the middle with a bird head and the queen on top of it and under it was an egg.

 Surprisingly they weren't even painted. They were made out of all different rocks and minerals like mosaics. I recognized some of the minerals and rocks that were on some of the sculptures--like obsidian, pink quartz, mica, and tiger's eye. They were all put together to make really cool things.

We found out the same person that made that garden made one in Tuscany where I was living and yet we didn't know. Next time we go to Italy, we are going to go the park, Il Giardino dei Tarocchi.

From there we found out we were close to the Wild Animal Park so we decided to go there. My grandparents and I have memberships and Kurt told us he did at home so when we got there we told the person at the gate and they looked up his membership and he got in free, too.

When we got there it was around lunch time so we decided to get something to eat. Gramma and Papa got chili-cheese dogs and Kurt and I got nacho supreme.

After that we headed over to the gorillas. They were pretty lazy. When one finally came out of the cave, it lay down right next to another one.

We went and saw a show that was funny. It showed some cool animals, a servile, a bird that could break dance, a river hog and a cheetah. I really liked the servile because it has excellent hearing and could hear high frequency which are not hearable to us.

We saw elephants, lions, giraffes, rhinos, elands, horn bills, guinea fowl and bunnies.

These were special because we will see many of them when we go to Kenya this summer. It made me even more excited.

Summer is not that far away--three months. I can't wait. Kenya, here I come.

WHY I LIKE MIDDLE SCHOOL

Hey everyone,
I have just been thinking about why I like middle school. Friends and learning is the best part for me. But I also like the teachers and the subjects too.
Each one of the subjects gets you ready for life in different ways. For example right now, I'm typing this by myself and I would not be able to if I didn't have computer class at school. Here is a picture of me typing this blog entry.




The best part about that is that I don't even need to look to type. If you're an adult, think about why you like work if you're not retired.
See ya' everyone

Wii blog fun

Hi everyone,
I am writing a blog entry on my Tv using the Wii. I am teaching my Gramma-mom how to do it as I am going through the steps.

From White to Black

When I was in kindergarten through second grade there was an after school karate program that I participated in every Friday. I really liked it but once a week wasn't very much.

First Grade

Then in the third grade I went to Italy to live and I took shotokan which is a type of karate. Some of my instructors had been champions. It was strange to find them in the small village where I lived, Greve in Chianti. The head of the school was Michele Romano who was several times European and World Champion. I learned a lot from them.

A Competition at the Karate School in Greve

When I returned to San Diego from Italy we looked for a good karate school. We eventually found the one I am going to now and it happened to be the instructor who taught at my elementary school on Fridays. That was in September 2007.

Since I started at the Allied Gardens School of Martial Arts (AGSMA), I had a goal that I would become a black belt.

There are 6 levels before first degree black belt. The first test I took when I was a white belt, I didn't just pass, I double passed which meant that I got 20 or more points higher than I needed. From second section I tested for third section and passed; from there I tested for fourth section and passed and so until I went all the way to sixth section.

Finally the big day came, my instructor thought I was ready to take my black belt test. I took my test on January 9. It was really intense, but I got through it. I didn't know if I passed that day because I needed to write two 1000 word essays. One of them was on what it means to be a black belt and the other was on loyalty and benevolence which were the code of ethics that I chose to memorize for my test. Part of earning my black belt was that I had to perform community service or help teach 15 lessons to less advanced students. I did the 15 lessons which went by pretty quick. I liked doing it.

When I was done with my essays, I turned them in and waited for them to be graded by the Head Instructor. The Monday after I turned in my essays, I found out that I had passed my test and had earned my first degree black belt. There have been 10's of thousands of students at this school, but only 42 have reached black belt level and I'm one of them.

Now I begin my real training. My new goal is to get to first stripe by the end of this year.


See ya

LEGO MANIA

Every Christmas, my uncle and I don't think it''s the same without getting a Lego. Even though my Uncle is a grown man, he really likes Legos. Each year we get one for him that has more and more pieces. Same thing with me because I'm getting better with legos.

Uncle Jeff opening his Lego--Can you tell how surprised he is?

I usually like to build my own. My specialty in my own buildings are usually airships or planes. I've even invented new transforming legos.

This year I got a 1624 piece Volkswagon Beetle. It's sort of special because my family plays the "slug bug" game. If you don't know what that is, every time you see a Volkswagon Beetle you get to hit someone if you're the first person to see it.

I wanted to start on it as soon as I could so two days after Christmas, I started to build it. It took me a while and through it I had some difficulties with pieces that were not there. I had to substitute pieces that I ended up not needing.

This was a good test for me because usually when I get frustrated I have a hard time. But doing this one I was able to keep going and finish my quest of making the lego.

When I was finished it looked like this.


Two weeks after I finished it, my grandpa pulled a joke on me and said that he had dropped it on the way to putting it in my room and broke it. But he didn't. I really did not think it was a good joke. My gramma didn't think it was funny either. My grandpa's always telling jokes (most of the time they're not even funny) but this one was really up there in not being funny.

I wonder what "Lego Santa" will bring next year.

See ya..