Our Blog - Safari 2023 - Lake Manyara National Park, Tanzania

A couple somewhat general pictures to start ... before arriving in Tanzania, we thought that the country was flat. Yes, we knew about Mount Kilimanjaro, but didn't realize how may mountains there were.

You'll see this in a few places ... but we kept having to stop and wait for animals to cross the road. In this case, it was cows and a few donkeys that belonged to some shepherd.

In one area, we saw lots of these huge termite mounds alongside the road. And I do mean huge ... probably 4-5 feet tall.

Lake Manyara National Park is situated between Lake Manyara and the Great Rift Valley. Since the 1920s, Lake Manyara area was used for sports hunting and then in 1957, a game reserve was established. It was given National Park status in 1960 and expanded in 1974 to its current size of 125 square miles.

One thing that we saw lots of and in various parks were baboons. They didn't seem to be very scared of people or trucks, either. Usually they were in fairly large groups and there were plenty of little babies around.

This was an interesting baboon group. They were all hanging out in the shade under a tree as well as being up in the tree. Some of them were all of the way up on the top. I panned around with the video to try to get a view of how many there were and what they were doing. Just after I stopped the video, two of the adult male baboons (I assume males) got into a little tiff and they ran past the truck and over to the left and into the bushes. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a good video of the fight.

There were several groups of elephants also, along with a few that were by themselves. This first one was an individual and I also got a little video of this elephant walking.

The lake is a shallow alkaline lake and the size changes based on the season. During the dry season, it is very small and in extreme dry periods, it actually dries up completely. When full, it is about 10 feet deep and covers 2/3 of the park. Near the lake were a set of trees that are dead, and the guide mentioned that they were covered during the last rainy season and died. They aren't easy to see, but the black "blobs" in the 2nd picture are African buffalo (sometimes called Cape buffalo). We never got very close to them in this park, but later in the trip, we got quite close.

Black-faced Vervet Monkey have a silver-grey colored body and black faces. They have white ridged eyebrows on their dark faces so are their feet and on the tips of their tails. In a couple of the pictures, you can see the long thorns on the trees they are in (I'll show more pictures later). These are umbrella thorn acacia trees, and are very common here. The giraffe can eat the leaves on the tree as somehow the thorns don't seem to bother them.

There are two main species of gazelle that we saw, this one being the Grant's gazelle. They look almost identical to the Thomson's gazelle, but I think I can tell the difference by looking for a dark brown stripe on the side (Thomson's gazelles have the dark stripe). The Grant's gazelle is also normally a bit larger. The video shows the group running away.

Another herd of elephants, this one basically walking just in front of us on the road. The video shows a couple of them coming out of the trees just next to us.

Zebra's were quite plentiful in most of the national parks, with some being closer to us than others. These weren't too far off, so I could get halfway decent pictures.

I tried to write down the name of this stork, but unfortunately, I didn't write it down correctly. We only saw one of these birds so sorry for the rather poor picture.

Today really seemed to be "elephant day", since we saw lots of elephants in this park. There were several different groups, some of them with baby elephants.

Then we caught up with more of the herd and more baby elephants.

The hotel that we stayed at was probably the best hotel we have ever stayed at, anywhere in the world! It had this large canopy bed with a mosquito screen that gets pull around it at night. You can see the really high ceiling of the cabin, where you can see the wooden slats. It had a claw-foot soaking tub and 3 showers (yes, 3 of them!) Two showers are together in the large area between the 2 white robes, and then there is an outdoor shower as well. Each cabin has its' own deck with covered seating.

Here we see what the cabins look like from the outside, with the thatched roofs, and then the main building. The top floor contains the restaurant and lounge/bar and below, on ground level, is a small gym. Outside is an infinity pool overlooking the Rift valley.

And now, a few pictures of the Rift Valley that we had a view of from our cabin, at different times of the evening and morning.