Alex Walker grew up in a National Geographic photo spread. Instead of a lawn with a picket fence or a city playground, the fourth generation East African’s childhood stomping grounds were the tea fields of Mufindi, the bush of southern Tanzania and Kenya’s Mau forest.
The Masai Mara National Reserve on Kenya’s southwestern border with Tanzania is blanketed with large mammals, so heavily in fact that it takes a day or two to register that the animals are real and not holographic or cutouts from a National Geographic photo spread. This is what happens when you combine a life spent mostly staring into a computer with the ease of international travel.