A travel that marks your heart

I arrived to Nairobi, a very hectic city with lots of traffic, really messy, lots of people crumbled up together, lots of movement.

The next day we headed up to the Masai Mara Reserve, going to a safari had been on my bucket list since I was 7 year ́s old, so I was so happy when I got an assignment for photographing wild animals for 3 days.

After 6 hours of going in a bumpy dirt road, I started to notice that the landscape was very dry, it was summer, lots of blue sky.

Just before entering the park we saw a giraffe running, and it was one of the most amazing moments of my life, where everything else disappears for a second and nature overpowers human perception.

Elephants walking freely
Photography: Sara Melotti

Seeing the animals in the wild, minding their own business and going through their day, I don’t know, it just put things into perspective, it makes you realize there is something more than that the life in a box that we are used to.

We drove through the reserve slowly; the light was golden and the moon was out. We saw elephants, giraffes, lions, lion cubs, we even saw a rhino, which by the way tried to attack the car. There was the wilde- beest migration, they were moving together through the landscape, across the river, just beautiful.

Moon
Photography: Sara Melotti

We spend the nights in the Park camping, I sat outside looking at the stars, silence and moonlight where the only things around. We didn’t get to see the Masai Villages, but there is quite a bit of Masai hanging around the camp. I heard that in Kenya the Masai culture are lion hunters, but right now they are protecting and keeping them alive, because they are one of the mayor sources of tourism. I think that was quite interesting!

The whole experience of visiting this National Reserve was so much better than I expected because of the perspective factor.

When you see an animal for the first time, when you see them running in the wild, running free, that moves something inside your heart! It makes you see the bigger picture; you see the world like a whole, everything becomes one.

Wildebeest Migration
Photography: Sara Melotti