I travel with expectations. Even though I say that I’ll take whatever comes my way. That the adventure is in the journey, not the destination. That the unexpected is what seasons a good trip. Yeah, that’s what I tell myself. But somewhere between planning the trip and packing the suitcase, I often start writing the story about the journey before it has even begun. That was the way I started my trip to Kenya.

I had been to Kenya before. I knew the Mara - or at least I thought I did. I carry memories of it with me. Endless grasslands, animals moving across a landscape that seemed untouched and timeless, miles of traveling bumpy safari trails enveloped in a cloud of sand or waiting long hours in the hot sun for a few extraordinary seconds when something happens and everything seems to come together. 

I was going back to a place I loved. Or, perhaps, I was going back to a memory of a place I loved?

Kenya began dismantling my expectations almost as soon as I arrived. 

I flew into Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport just as the Kenya Aviation Workers’ Union went on strike over staff hiring and compensation practices. I arrived around midnight after almost 24 hours of travel time and crossing 7 time zones. I was exhausted and I had descended into total chaos. I spent several hours just trying to determine where my luggage might be and finally gave up in despair. The carefully packed clothes and equipment that seemed so necessary when I left home suddenly existed somewhere else in the world. 

There was nothing I could do but wait.

Waiting, of course, is something every wildlife photographer understands. You find a lion sleeping beneath a tree and imagine that eventually she will rise. You watch elephants moving toward a waterhole and predict where they will cross. You see a cheetah staring across the grass and begin constructing the hunt that surely must follow. 

We are constantly making predictions.

And then the lion sleeps for another three hours.

The elephants turn around.

The cheetah lies down.

Or, just when you have stopped expecting anything at all, something extraordinary happens.

Wildlife has never cared very much about the photographer’s plans.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons I love photographing it. ☺️

Patience and expectation are strangely intertwined. We wait because we expect something to happen. But if expectation becomes too specific, we can become so focused on the photograph we have imagined that we fail to see the photograph actually being offered to us. 

This time, the Mara itself challenged my expectations. The place I remembered had changed.

Tourism had grown. There were more vehicles, more people, more evidence that this landscape I had preserved so carefully in my memory had continued changing while I was away. I found myself mourning something I couldn’t quite name. 

Was the Mara really so different?

Or had I been carrying an idealized version of it all these years?

Memory is an unreliable photographer. It crops out what doesn’t fit. It softens the background. It improves the light. Given enough time, it can turn a place into something that perhaps never existed quite as perfectly as I had remembered it.

And so my photography began to change. 

Instead of always trying to make the sharp, technically perfect wildlife photograph, I began deliberately moving my camera during the exposure.

The animals blurred.

The grass became streaks of color.

Edges disappeared.

Reality became something closer to memory.

I began thinking of these photographs as my Dreams of Africa.

They were not photographs of Africa exactly as it was in front of me.

They were photographs of the Africa I remembered, the Africa I had imagined before returning, and perhaps even the Africa I wished were still there. 

There was nostalgia in them. 

But there was also something else.

Acceptance.

Because eventually expectation has to loosen its grip. 

The luggage arrives - or it doesn’t.

The animal behaves as you predicted - or surprises you completely. 

The place you return to is not the place you left.

And sometimes the photograph you thought you wanted is not the photograph you needed to make.

I went back to Kenya expecting to photograph a place I remembered.

Instead, I found myself photographing the distance between memory and reality. 

And somewhere in that distance - somewhere between the sharp photograph and the blurred one, between the Mara I remembered and the Mara that exists today - I found another Africa. 

Not the one I expected.

The one that was there.

Perhaps real patience is the willingness to wait long enough for our expectations to change.

And the video of the day is:  I Am Africa by Le Pacte de Cendres - an official musical trailer and atmospheric anthem created specifically for the Le Pacte de Cendres Afro-fantasy project.