Lake Manyara

Day 44 2/27/99: Lake Manyara National Park

Click here for a large image of the map from "The Collins Field Guide to the National Parks of East Africa."

We  arrived at Lake Manyara National Park.

Here was a sign at the entrance to Lake Manyara. Strange. What does it mean "Take No Liberties with Game Animals"?

Lake Manyara (123 square miles)  is famous for its tree-climbing lions--don't believe everything you read in the guide book. In my case I was using "The Collins Field Guide to the National Parks of East Africa" by J.G. Williams. It was first published in 1967, and the version I brought has 1981 as its latest copyright. Why did I bring such an old book? I brought it because this is the same field guide that we brought to Kenya in 1991, and it has all my old notes from before.

[EOS] A troop of Olive baboons welcomed us to Lake Manyara. Okay, I'm just kidding. They were used to tourists and paid no attention to us; they would rather groom each other.

As stated in Wilderness Travel's brochure: "Afternoon game drive through acacia woodlands and dense--almost tropical--forests, in search of the abundant bird life ..."

Theresa was riding with the top of the Land Cruiser opened.

[EOS] A large Nile Monitor lizard. It did not move at all. Is it real or a prop for tourists? :-)

[EOS] A female bushbuck.

We stopped and looked at some warthogs.

[EOS] A variety of birds lived at this soda lake. The water in the lake came from the Ngorongoro Highland. It was too difficult to take a good picture of the hippos that were mostly submerged under water far away from where we were.

[EOS] After seeing a very shy jackal (okay, this is my excuse for not having a picture of the jackal), we saw this pairs of lions mating. I knew this from before, but I was still amazed that lions mate every 15 minutes! for several days!

We saw a common zebra. I was not able to get a picture of some impalas. There was a harem of 20 female impalas with one lone male, which usually is in command for only 3 weeks.

[by Bruce] Look at the intense look on my face. What was I look at? Elephants, of course. Here were Lois, Anne, Liza, Theresa, and me enjoying the safari.

  [EOS] Since elephants are our favorite animal, Theresa and I were very excited to finally see an elephant. This was a young adult male that walked right in front of us. Pretty cool. We then saw some cape buffaloes and Sykes' monkeys.

[EOS] If we were happy to see one lone male elephant, then we were happier to see a baby elephant with its mother.

[EOS] Of course, we were happiest when we saw a family of elephants feeding and walking in the forest.

[EOS] This Masai Giraffe was just standing in the forest for a "photo-op."

[EOS] The last animals we saw at Lake Manyara were a group of banded mongoose busily digging for food--termites in this case. Gee, I wonder if we can use them to control termites back in U.S.? :-)

As the road wound through the park, we crossed over several picturesque streams.

Lake Manyara Serena Safari Lodge is somewhere up there on top of the Great Rift Valley escarpment.

[EOS] A nice view of the Manyara soda lake as we made our way up the escarpment to our lodge.

As it turned out that Theresa and I both liked Lake Manyara National Park a lot. It was compact, but it was very easy to see lots of animals in just a few hours of game drive. We highly recommend this place.