Here’s a thing I never thought would happen. On a beautiful weekday morning a few weeks ago, my partner and I sat down to have a picnic breakfast under the shade of an acacia tree in a remote area of the Maasai Mara in Kenya, just a stone’s throw from the border of Tanzania. We were surrounded by an ocean of green grass and blue sky, save for one perfect tree our guide had parked us under. Just a few days into our trip, the visual stun of the African landscape had still not lost any of its abject wonder. After nearly two years spent safely holed up in our Brooklyn apartment, sipping a cup of coffee while sitting in the tall grass of the Kenya savanna felt like some kind of improbable fever dream. It was at this moment that our guide pointed to something approaching on the horizon. “We have guests,” he said, as two adolescent male lions casually sauntered toward us. Rather than flee, the three of us took our coffee and quietly hopped back into the safari jeep, waiting to see what the lions might do. As our guide predicted, the three of us were of little interest to the enormous cats. They passed by our jeep — within a few mesmerizing feet of us — before finding a spot a few hundred feet away to lie down and sun themselves. Eventually we made our way back to our own picnic, finishing our coffee and granola with two large lions visibly dozing nearby. This, I realized, is why people go on safari. Even as you are experiencing it, it doesn’t feel real.
