The circle of life

On New Year's holiday in Istanbul, I thought we honed a very pleasurable form of sightseeing - namely, waking up late, leaving your place after noon, starting with lunch, taking in a tourist site or (at most) two, stopping for a drink/coffee/hookah, then calling it a day and moving on to the evening festivities.

But this week on safari in the Masai Mara - one of Africa's most popular game parks - I found an even lazier style of tourism: the game drive. You climb into a Land Rover, turn on your camera, and at this point your work is basically done. A guide drives you over dirt paths and open fields and comes to a stop about 20 feet from a giraffe, herd of elephants, lion and lioness mating, etc. At which point you lift your camera to your face and click away for a few minutes while your fellow tourists make the requisite 'oohs' and 'aahs,' as well as the odd anthropomorphic joke. Then you are off to the next bit of wildlife, and on and on for the next couple of hours. In between game drives, you eat and sleep - there's nothing else to do in the Mara.

It was a perfect vacation. Mom and Dad enjoyed the experience, right down to the "luxury tent" accommodations. This is the thing to do on safari - you sleep under a canvas tent, only the tent is bigger than a Manhattan studio apartment and has hot water and electricity. Still it felt quite rustic - especially when a eight-inch green slug crawled onto Dad's bed on the first night and I had to escort it outside on a piece of newspaper.

It's the start of the long-awaited rainy season in Kenya, so we got splattered with rain and mud all week while mucking around the park looking for leopards (no dice). The rain fell so hard and fast that tire tracks became rivers of mud that criss-crossed the savannah as far as you could see. Still, the Mara landscape is amazing, and we did get ridiculously close to elephants, cheetahs and - best of all - lions.

If you haven't seen lions mate in the wild, well, let me just say, it's a scene. The lion and lioness spend most of their day lying in the grass. Every so often one of them gets up and does the lion version of a wink at the other. Then they are off. The lion climbs on top of the lioness, he growls, she winces, and it's all over in about 10 seconds.

Then they resume their lying around. The tourists proceed to make every obvious male performance joke in a smattering of languages, everyone laughs, and then it's on to the next African photo op. Authentic, it's not, but for a vacation you can't beat it.