Lake Manyara

A couple of weeks ago Dyan and her daughter Nicole from LA invited me to go on an overnight safari to Lake Manyara and Ngorogoro Crater with them. 

Last Monday morning our safari driver and guide, David, picked us up early from the volunteer house. We drove into town to pick up some things and then we started on the road to Lake Manyara which is about two and a half hours from Arusha. The first part of the journey out of Arusha was paved road, as was the last part into Mto wa Mbu, the closest village to Lake Manyara National Park. The rest of the trip was dusty, bumpy, dirt roads. These are not like our rural gravel roads in New Zealand which might be a little bumpy. This is Africa. Everything is extreme – including bumping over great rifts and valleys and down into deep holes in the middle of the road. Also, the road builders feel the need to put speed bumps in unexpected places in the roads – just in case you were thinking of doing the impossible and driving too fast!

It was amazing to watch the scenery outside the window. This was the first time in the month that I’ve been here, that I had been outside of Arusha. I had seen the city side of Tanzania, but what I hadn’t seen was the small villages and mud huts and plains and the people walking, walking everywhere – herding cows and goats and carrying baskets of food on their heads and bundles of sticks on their backs. It was interesting and eye opening. These are things you hear of and that you know exist – but to see it with your own eyes is something else. It makes it real.

When we got to Mto wa Mbu we went and dropped our bags off at the Twiga Lodge where we would be staying the night and then continued on to Lake Manyara. We stopped so that David could open the pop up roof and then we were officially on safari. Lake Manyara surprised me. I had never seen any photos of either it or Ngorogoro so I had no idea what they looked like. I expected Lake Manyara to look like the picture in my head of what going on safari looks like – great plains and animals in the distance and all that. Not so! Lake Manyara National Park is mostly forest with flood plains only down near the lakeshore. The lake itself is salt water and shallow – at its deepest point it is only 3.7m deep. 

Nicole and I outside the information place at Lake Manyara

It was all so beautiful – you could stand up in the safari car and look out at the trees, keeping an eye out all the time for tree climbing lions! The first animals we saw was a troop of baboons coming straight up the road towards us. There were dozens of baboons, all different sizes, with tiny babies clinging on to their mothers. The babies were cute and the baboons looked fine from the front. When they turned around though… I have to say – there are few things more ugly than a baboon’s bottom! Especially due to the fact that many of them had open sores or wounds.

Baboons coming up the road towards us

When we started out on our safari David asked us what animals we would like to see. I wanted to see lions. Dyan wanted to see giraffes. Nicole wanted to see elephants. At Lake Manyara she certainly got her fill of them! We first saw one solitary elephant which walked alongside the car for a while. We wondered where its family was as elephants usually stay in groups.

One lone elephant

An hour or so later, after driving along by the lake and spotting zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, warthog, antelope and lots and lots of monkeys, we came upon a whole herd of elephants. They surrounded the car and crossed the road behind our vehicle, so close that we could have reached out and touched them. It was amazing to be so close to such beautiful gentle creatures. You could see every wrinkle in their skin. Nicole described it as "magical". We spent a long time watching them walk around, cross the road one at a time and eat grass and other vegetation. We saw one drinking from a stream and spraying water on himself to keep cool in the middle of the day.

A mother and baby elephant not far from our car

We saw a lot of impala, as well as antelope in the distance. The first group of impala we saw was a male with his herd. Later on we saw the bachelor herd, which are separate from the others. David told us that one male impala can have up to thirty females in his herd!

Male impala (top left) and his herd

At one point we could see giraffes so we got out of the car (you do so at your own risk!) and went a little closer to the water. There were six Maasai giraffes which are the tallest subspecies of giraffe and have the darkest markings. They are the only type of giraffe which live at Lake Manyara. One of the giraffes was noticeably taller and bigger than the others - I figured he must be Papa Giraffe! 

Giraffe down by the water

My favourite animals that we saw at Lake Manyara were the vervet monkeys. They are very light coloured and look quite silky. A lot of them had babies which scampered along the road beside us. They were so playful and had very long tails compared to the size of their bodies. Apart from the fact that it would be cruel to take an animal like that out of the wild, I would have liked to have taken a baby one home to keep as a pet. They were adorable.

Adult vervet monkey up a tree

There were many beautiful trees in the park and one of my favourites was the boabab tree. The one in the picture below is a particularly big one. Apparently they can live to be thousands of years old. I found it amazing that this tree is so huge and so old - David said hundreds of years old, if not a thousand. Imagine what that tree has seen. Imagine what's changed in the last few centuries. In the West, the whole world as we know it has changed and changed and changed again in that time. Apart from the fact that there are now safari cars filled with people and probably less animals, I suspect less has changed in this particular part of the world. I suppose we'll never know for sure.

The beautiful and ancient boabab tree

Before we left Lake Manyara we went down to the hippo pool where you can get out of the car and hopefully spot some hippos. Unfortunately there were none there that day (although I wasn't entirely sure where they go... do they wander far away from their pool?), but what we did see was two big buses filled with local high school students. They came over, asking to take photos with us. After we obliged David told us that they would consider their tour of Lake Manyara a success simply because they had their photo taken with the wazungu.

After a good six to seven hours at the park we left to go back to our lodge, spotting some baboons eating bananas on the way. There were no banana palms around so I can only assume that some friendly tourists threw them their way! There are many signs in the park though saying not to feed the animals, because if they get accustomed to it then they may bite you.

The Twiga Lodge was lovely - clean rooms with the softest bed I'd slept on in a long time! All our meals were included with the safari so we had dinner there. It was very nice and very typical of Africa (as I have found out) - rice, beans and chips with vegetables or meat and then fresh fruit for desert.

All in all, it was a very nice day. I enjoyed spending the day with friends and it was exciting to see animals in the wild like that. Nicole and I both loved being able to stand up in the car and look out at everything that was going on around us. It was such a beautiful place and so different to how I thought it would be. I'm finding that is the case with a lot of things here. Different from expected, but so beautiful and yes, magical, in their own way.

xoxo,

-Hannah