Text : Kurt Kutay
Photos : Kurt Kutay and John Poole
Wildland Adventures is offering scheduled small-group departures of the ground-breaking Maasailand Safari as a model for reforming traditional safari tourism according to a carefully tailored set of Ecotourism Principles and Code of Conduct that Maasai have set forth as standards for all tourism conducted on Maasailand. It is designed by Wildland Adventures in cooperation with the Maasai Environmental Resource Coalition (MERC), a grassroots network of Maasai organizations advocating for the protection of traditional land rights of the Maasai people, and for conservation, management, and sustainable use of the great ecosystems of East Africa. on behalf of the Maasai people for a balanced approach to tourism in Kenya. Maasailand Safaris offer a way for tourists to combine wildlife viewing with opportunities to learn about conservation issues, and to experience Maasai culture in an atmosphere of mutual respect and enrichment for guests and hosts. By directly working at the grass-roots village level, our trips support community-based, income-generating ecotourism enterprises.
Contacts
Wildland Adventures, Inc.
The Travelers Conservation Trust
Email : kurt@wildland.com
3516 NE 155th St
Seattle, WA 98155
Tel : (800) 345-4453
Fax : (206) 363-6615
Internet : www.wildland.com
MERC Maasai Environmental Resource Coaltion.
Meitamei Dapash, the Maasai community leader and Exec Director
website at www.maasaierc.org.
Recommended Tours :
Consult- www.wildland.com/trips/details/74/kenya_itin.aspx
Groups are invited to visit Maasai schools and learn about Maasai culture and village concerns by meeting with teachers and community elders. Traditional dance and music is presented. Guests have opportunities to purchase native bead work directly from the artists and to go on walks in the bush with Maasai warriors. Special arrangements are made to meet with a park warden of the Maasai Mara Game Reserve which is managed by an elected council of Maasai community leaders. The group also spends a day in the field with a staff biologist of the Amboseli Elephant Research Project who is an educated female Maasai biologist of the region to learn about the ongoing 30-year elephant study led by American scientist Cynthia Moss. Trip participants are fully briefed on what to expect when visiting Maasai Enkang (“home/village”), proper etiquette in remote villages unfamiliar with western culture, and how to be a respectful guest.
A special departure of the Maasailand Safari organized by Wildland Adventures is a group of beading artists formed through Beads and Beyond, a local beadwork retail store of Bellevue, Washington. They carry a large cache of beads to re-supply a Maasai women’s beading cooperative they started in 2003 near Amboseli National Park. In turn, these tourists are invited to Maasai communities who have had little contact with tourism. The Maasai are noted for their elaborate bead work, and tour participants who are also experts in the art of beading, share techniques and produce jewellery pieces together with native women using tools, beads and magnifying glasses donated by the tour groups.
Meitamei Dapash, MERC’s Executive Director and the first Maasai trip leader of the Maasailand Safari, reported back from the one departure of while in the Maasai Mara to state that : “This program is not only empowering Maasai women, it is also bringing down walls of stereotypes and negative propaganda of the tourism industry about Maasai people’s culture and aspirations.”
Click here for his full report : http://www.wildland.com/trips/africa/100035/ken_tripreviews.aspx