lake manyara national park

Lake Manyara was my favorite for its landscape. Unlike Tarangire, Ngorongoro and the Serengeti, Manyara was jungly and forested, with shade, dappling sunlight and streams. Here's a bushbuck:

The lake swells in the wet season, shrinks in the dry season and is home to millions of flamingos. There are so many that the lake actually shimmers a hazy pink.

I guess we got lucky, as we saw a blue monkey as soon as we entered the park. Blue monkeys are apparently quite difficult to see up close because they are very quick and very shy.

It was interesting to see how expressive some of the animals were. They sometimes seemed downright human. For better...

Or worse. Silly baboons.

I loved the impalas, especially the males with their graceful horns.

And we saw another vervet monkey with his famous bright blue scrotum. I found it interesting as most mammals don't exhibit such bright blue colors.

We saw our first hippos, for which Lake Manyara is also famous, and they seemed like a real lazy bunch-- but there are more hippo fatalities each year than by any other animal. When hippos feel their water source is cut off (i.e., some not-too-bright human gets between a hippo and its water), they will charge said human, often with unfortunate results.

It's funny that Lake Manyara is considered one of the lesser parks, as there are endless fields of roaming animals. Here, for example, are gazelles on the left and baboons on the right, each grazing peacefully.

Giraffes roamed the land with hundreds of meters between them. (And you can again see the hazy pink of the flamingos on Lake Manyara.)

We learned that giraffes drink with their front legs spread apart to protect themselves from lions and other predators. Not surprisingly, the most vulnerable part of a giraffe is its neck, and it's most vulnerable when it bends down to drink.

I loved seeing the different animals living peacefully together and watching the (huge) baby animals wobble around on unsteady legs.

Aside from all of the big animals, the birds in Manyara were impressive, too.

And the comical highlight of our day was an elephant scratching his belly and behind on a (huge) termite mound. Poor termites.

Next up: the famous Serengeti!

tarangire national park

We're back! And we have lots of catching up to do. We went on safari for my partner's 29th birthday, visiting Tarangire National Park, Lake Manyara National Park, Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area. So, without further ado, here are some photos from Tarangire National Park, most famous for its baobab trees and large herds of elephants.

This is a dik dik, which, at about two feet tall, is like a miniature deer. They're usually seen in pairs and quite shy, but one of the ones we saw didn't seem shy at all.

For lunch, we had a picnic overlooking a river where lots of animals came to drink.

There were some vervet monkeys nearby:

There were also baboons just a few feet away, watching us eat.

After I took this photo and turned my back to walk back to my table, a male baboon charged right by me toward a nearby table of picnickers with incredible speed and no warning at all. This female with her baby and another female followed, also charging right past me (one on each side) towards the picnic table, and the poor people who had been eating and enjoying the lovely view were terrified and threw their packed lunches into the air to avoid any kind of direct confrontation with the baboons. The people, who had leaped off the bench and to safety a few meters away, watched as the baboons calmly ate their lunches from the ground. I was lucky I had eaten and had no food on me.

Since nothing unfortunate happened to anyone, it was rather exciting, but it was also pretty scary how quickly the baboons transformed from mellow creatures, just sitting there, to fierce attackers. Our guide told us that a baboon had recently been shot because it had gotten too aggressive.

Here's the mother and baby baboon after they'd enjoyed their stolen lunch.

It's funny. Most people who come to the national parks come to see the Big 5: hippos, lions, leopards, rhinos and buffalo (so called because they were the animals which would most likely kill the hunters). But for my partner, for a long time, his favorite animal was the little warthog. It isn't the prettiest thing, but in my partner's defense, it was one of the more animated animals.

After lunch, we passed more vervet monkeys and some impalas.

The antelopes are considered unimportant, so the guides practically run them over in their quest to find the bigger, "more exciting" animals. It's too bad, though, as I think the gazelles and impalas are really beautiful and graceful.

We saw tons of elephants, and the biggest herd we saw had over twenty mothers and babies. (The males do their own thing.)

We saw zebras (here with wildebeest, probably one of the most awkward, gangly animals I've seen, in the background).

And this one had an itch on his belly that he scratched with a twig, which we found entertaining.

Seeing giraffes was very cool, as they're so tall (about 12-15 feet!) but seem so sweet and serene.

But maybe it's just their long eyelashes.

We saw more baboons, and my partner got a kick out of the babies riding their moms like horses. You'll also notice that the roads are all dirt roads-- the Tanzanian powers-that-be decided that dirt roads would keep the parks more natural.

After our first exhilarating day of wildlife watching, we were treated to a beautiful sunset, a bright segment of rainbow and a sunset-lit Maasai warrior walking by our campsite with his cows.

Next up: Lake Manyara, my favorite of the national parks, even though it's much smaller and no one has heard of it...

the now-defunct african z train adventure

We camped for a week in the Serengeti, on the rim of Ngorongoro Crater and next to Lake Manyara and Tarangire National Parks. It was amazing, and we now have about a zillion photos of animals to go through.

So, the good news is we are now done with all of our work and can travel for pure fun. The bad news (for the blog) is that we’re leaving our computer behind and will be returning to our tech-free hobo backpacking ways.

We were going to embark on what I called the African Z Train adventure, which would have been really awesome. We would start our journey in Zanzibar and then take trains wherever they were available to Zambia, where we’d visit Victoria Falls and cross into Zimbabwe, go through Botswana (not a Z but still cool) and finish in South Africa (ZA). The only problem was that the train across Tanzania was booked until December 25^th, the train that ran down Botswana is no longer running, and the very cool historic ferry, the MV Liemba, that we were going to take down into Zambia runs sometimes and sometimes not (and you can only buy tickets at the shore). So, with about a month left, we didn’t want to get stranded somewhere and scrapped that idea and hope to resurrect it in the future.

Our new plan involves traveling down the Mozambican coast through Swaziland and into South Africa. We were going to add in a Malawi detour, but it would add a week, and we decided we wanted to spend more time exploring Mozambique rather than scurrying to catch the next bus/train/ferry/bicycle taxi (seriously). In almost comic fashion, the process for crossing into Mozambique from Malawi is something like this: take a bus to a small town one kilometer from the border; walk one kilometer to the border; catch a minibus to this passport check station; and then you can either walk or pray someone will give you a ride about 25 more kilometers to the nearest town. Crossing into Mozambique from Tanzania requires a canoe because there is no bridge across the river along the border. (We’ve decided to take a tiny plane across the border because that 1+ hour on a plane saves us about ten days of travel.)

So! We’re off to Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa (and maybe Lesotho, but we’ll see how time goes) and will return with lots of stories and photos from all of our travels in December. Happy Thanksgiving!