Primate Safaris
Contact us
T : +256 392 159 498
T : +9 1 9544 666 665
E : info@primatesafaris.com
Primate Safaris
Contact us
T : +256 392 159 498
T : +9 1 9544 666 665
E : info@primatesafaris.com
National Park
Lake Manyara National Park.
About the Park
Ernest Hemingway called it the loveliest lake he had ever seen. He was not wrong, and he had seen a few.
Stretched along the floor of the Great Rift Valley in northern Tanzania, Lake Manyara sits beneath a dramatic western escarpment that rises 600 meters above it in a wall of ancient volcanic rock, the forest clinging to its face in impossible green. The lake itself, shallow, alkaline, shimmering, fills nearly two-thirds of the park's 325 square kilometers, its surface shifting colour through the day from silver to gold to deep rose as the light changes and the flamingos move. It is one of those landscapes that photographers and painters and writers keep returning to, because it refuses to look the same twice.
But Lake Manyara does not survive on beauty alone. It earns its place on the northern Tanzania safari circuit with something altogether more surprising, its legendary tree-climbing lions and impressively tusked elephants. The tree-climbing lions of Manyara are one of Africa's most celebrated wildlife curiosities, big cats sprawled along branches above the forest floor, regarding the world below with magnificent indifference, in a behaviour so unusual that researchers have debated its origins for decades. Nobody has reached a definitive answer. The lions have not been asked. They simply keep climbing, and visitors keep coming to see them.
The park packs an extraordinary diversity of habitats into its compact size, groundwater forest thick with fig and mahogany at the entrance, giving way to acacia woodland, then open floodplain, then the alkaline lake shore, then papyrus swamp. Each zone holds its own cast of characters. The forest at the park entrance is home to habituated troops of olive baboons and blue monkeys so relaxed around vehicles that close encounters feel almost domestic. Elephants move between the Marang forest and the lake shore in herds whose tusks are notably large, a genetic legacy of populations that were once, in the 1960s, the highest density of elephants anywhere in Africa. Hippos wallow in the shallow lake. Buffalo herds number in the hundreds. Giraffes browse the acacia canopy against the backdrop of the escarpment in a composition so perfectly East African it looks arranged.
And then the birds. Over 400 bird species have been recorded in the park, with 1.9 million flamingos at peak season turning the lake's shallows into a living, breathing, impossibly pink panorama that stretches to the horizon. Pelicans drift overhead in formation. Marabou storks patrol the shore with their undertaker's posture. Yellow-billed storks fish the shallows. Crowned cranes step through the grassland with their golden headdresses catching the afternoon light. A serious birder could spend a week here and not exhaust the possibilities.
Lake Manyara is often the first stop on the northern Tanzania circuit, a warm-up, people call it, before the Serengeti and Ngorongoro. Those people are underestimating it. Come with open eyes, and you will leave with memories that need no comparison to anything that follows.
Wildlife
- Lion
- Leopard
- Elephant
- Cape Buffalo
- Cheetah
- Giraffe
- Zebra
- Hippopotamus
- Wildebeest
- Hyena
- Warthog
- Flamingo
- Vulture
- African Fish Eagle
- Hornbill
- Pelican
- Crowned Crane
- Marabou Stork
- Impala
- Waterbuck
- Dik-dik
- Bushbuck
- Baboon
- Vervet Monkey
- Mongoose
- African Civet
- Genet
- Jackal
- Lilac-breasted Roller
- Weaver Bird