The program for the morning was a game drive through Lake Manyara National Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Manyara_National_Park). We were up fairly early, Marco Poloing the kids, but they were pretty much all packed up by themselves... what travellers!
Lake Manyara is one of the oldest and smallest national parks in Tanzania. It's only a few hundred square kilometers, and a good portion of that is taken up by the namesake lake that is 42 kilometers long. Basically the entire park lies between the escarpment area where we stayed last night and the lake.
The park is known for its "tree climbing lions". Lions don't normally climb trees very much (as opposed to Leopards who are often up trees, but the terrain around Lake Manyara was a little more dense at times - like a jungle or young rainforest and the lions have had to adapt in order to see their prey better.
Actually, Grayson said matter of factly, the lions were pretty hard to see here. We were after some hippos, baboons, pelicans, more elephants, giraffe and more - all of which we found throughout the game drive.
We had some really close interactions with elephants and giraffe, and were more than once surrounded by a travelling pack of maybe fifty to seventy baboons. A lot of times we would see baby or infant baboons riding on the backs of mothers, but a couple of times we saw them actually sitting up and riding their moms like a horse - it was pretty funny.
The hippos were out in the boggy areas surrounding the lake, but they were mostly submerged. There were hundreds and hundreds of storks and pelicans hanging out in large packs and a huge group of buffalo lying closely together in the great plain between the bog and the start of the forest.
We stopped for a picnic lunch around 1pm at one of the designated sites in the park. Tom and Grayson looked very relaxed, and upon saying so to them, they agreed - a long, relaxed Safari that we were doing was much more enjoyable for them too. There wasn't a lot of pressure to see everything in four days, and there weren't as many long drives and really long days. It has suited us perfectly so far.
On our 45 minute drive back to the front gates we passed a dry sandy river bed where six giraffes were all standing together, pretty much posing for us - it was beautiful. They are such an odd, awkward yet graceful animal and I think I have a newfound appreciation of them after seeing them so much in the wild. Still, if they got killed by a cat, nobody would complain.....lol.
A few more hippos lounging in the eddy of a stream, a troop of baboons passing by and another few elephants putting on a layer of dirt for sunscreen and we were back at the front gates.
Tom was having some issues with the clutch in his vehicle, so we decided to stop at a little Masai market and shop around a bit and pick up some snacks for later. After loading up and a pretty quick repair, we were off. The next destination and tonight's stopover would be Lake Eyasi.
We stayed on the smooth highway for a while until we reached a fairly major crossroads town. Every once in a while you would see a makeshift tourist shop that would have the same looking pretty crappy paintings and trinkets on display, but I wondered where all the customers were. You sure didn't see masses of tourists or Safari cars, especially not in transit between destinations. Last night's hotel, Kiruruma Tented Lodge, was pretty empty - just two other couples. These "minor destination" places that only required a night stay max must be pretty difficult to manage - their number of guests seemed to vary wildly from day to day.
The road we turned on after the crossroads town was a clay, dusty, bumpy road that put most of us to sleep. The terrain here was way different than anything we'd seen so far, and as we got closer to our lodge, some of the backdrop made me feel that this area of the country had had outside help. There was a World Vision office and another building labelled "women's trade training center". One of our requests to Amanda when we booked our Safari was to do some real cultural experiences, and tomorrow would be one of those.
Our tented lodge rooms were very nice - it was basically the same as our place at Tarangire, but a little more rustic. Alex and Kim opted to do a little walk through an onion farm and go to a sunset viewing area with our guide for tomorrow, while the rest of us opted to chill and play cards. Ahh...relaxing.
The food has been fantastic so far, and tonight was no different. Like last night, our dinner consisted of a three course meal - pumpkin soup, baked chicken, rice and vegetables for our main, and tonight was a rosemary cake with maple syrup (Abby reminds me that it was the good kind and not that Aunt Jemima crap...lol).
We've had short opportunities to make sure the adult's phones (for photos), iPads (for blogs) and cameras are all charged. Wifi has basically been non existent - sometimes I've been able to get on wifi for five minutes to upload a blog from my notes app, but attaching pictures and uploading video is next to impossible.... I will try and do that when we are back.
On the bright side, the kids have not asked for their devices...not once. They are such great kids and the Versly have been such great travelling companions. We are all looking forward to the cultural experience tomorrow, but we're also peaking around the corner at the next week or so.... it feels like the Safari will be ratcheting up to the next level very soon.
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