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On Safari We spent the next two days in two of Kenya's most celebrated national parks, Amboseli and Tsavo. We made game drives each morning and afternoon from our bases at the Amboseli Serena Safari Lodge and Salt Lick Lodge, both of which were very comfortable and offered delicious food. The scenery was breathtaking, with the savannah stretching as far as the eye could see, distinctive acacia or baobab trees visible in all directions, and stately Mount Kilimanjaro towering in the distance over the Tanzanian border. Of course, the main attraction was the wildlife. We saw dozens of animal species, including elephant, hippo, giraffe, lion, buffalo, impala, gazelle, hartebeest, and warthog. We saw even more varieties of birds, the most
		Photo by Rick Fienberg

impressive of which was the 6-foot-tall goliath heron. Watching them in their natural habitat, I felt an awe similar to what I experience when looking at a splendid deep-sky object in my telescope's eyepiece. No more zoos for me!


Photo by Pamela Moodie		Photo by Pamela Moodie

With the safaris behind us, we made our way to the Whitesands Hotel on the beach at Mombassa. After a good night's sleep, we gathered in the lobby to board buses that would take us to the Marco Polo after giving us a tour of the city. Soon the place was buzzing with news that another hotel in the city had been hit by a terrorist car bomb. Not surprisingly, we were hustled off to the ship via the most direct route, skipping the tour of Mombassa. Captain Nenad Mogic announced that we would also have to skip our first port of call at Zanzibar, Tanzania, due to concerns about further terrorist activity in the region. So we steamed at a rather leisurely pace toward Nosy Komba, Madagascar, as we all got used to life aboard the ship. For some of us it was like a homecoming, since we had been on the Marco Polo before for the August 1999 eclipse in the Black Sea.

		Except for the stop at Nosy Komba, where we saw several varieties of lemurs, we spent five days at sea en route to our eclipse-viewing site. This gave us ample opportunities for enrichment lectures and stargazing. Almost every talk was given to a full house, which comes as no surprise given the quality of our lecture staff. Steve O'Meara and David Levy, both contributing editors at Sky & Telescope, are two of today's most celebrated visual observers. Steve observed dark spokes in Saturn's rings before the Voyager spacecraft photographed them, and David codiscovered the comet that crashed into Jupiter in 1994. Owen Gingerich, recently retired from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is one of the world's most renowned historians of astronomy. In addition to preparing our fellow passengers to watch and photograph the eclipse, we engaged them in spirited discussions about all aspects of astronomy and cosmology.
Photo by Peter Oberbeck

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Revised: October 25, 2005.
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