A Small Park With an Outsized Soul

Tanzania’s national parks range from the vast and the internationally celebrated to the small and the intimately characterful, and Lake Manyara National Park falls definitively into the latter category — a relatively compact protected area of approximately 330 square kilometres that packs within its modest boundaries a diversity of habitat, a quality of wildlife encounter, and a scenic beauty of landscape that would be remarkable in a park ten times its size. Situated at the base of the dramatic Great Rift Valley escarpment in the Manyara Region of northern Tanzania, approximately 126 kilometres from Arusha and frequently included in the classic northern circuit alongside the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, and Tarangire, Lake Manyara is a park of concentrated, multifaceted excellence that rewards every visitor who approaches it with the attention and the patience its character deserves.

The park’s defining feature is the Lake Manyara itself — a shallow, alkaline soda lake that covers approximately 200 square kilometres of the park’s total area and that is one of the most visually extraordinary lakes in East Africa. The lake’s alkalinity, while inhospitable to most aquatic life, provides the perfect conditions for the blue-green algae that sustains the enormous flocks of flamingos that are the lake’s most famous and most photographically celebrated inhabitants — birds so numerous and so brilliantly coloured that the sight of tens of thousands of them gathered along the lake’s shallow margins turns the pale, alkaline surface of the water a vivid, extraordinary pink that seems almost unreal in its beauty and its intensity.

The Tree-Climbing Lions: Manyara’s Most Famous Residents

Lake Manyara National Park is most widely known in the safari world for a phenomenon of animal behaviour so unusual, so contrary to the normal habits of its species, and so consistently observed within the park’s boundaries that it has become the park’s defining wildlife celebrity — the tree-climbing lions of Lake Manyara. Lions, as every wildlife enthusiast knows, are ground-dwelling animals — heavy, powerful hunters whose anatomy and hunting strategy are perfectly adapted to the open savanna and whose normal behavioural repertoire does not include climbing trees. Yet in Lake Manyara, and in very few other locations in Africa, lions are regularly and reliably observed resting in the branches of large trees — fig trees, acacia trees, and sausage trees — at heights of five metres or more, draped across the branches with an improbable, languid ease that seems to defy both gravity and the conventional understanding of lion behaviour.

The reason for this extraordinary behaviour is not definitively established, though the most widely accepted explanations involve a combination of tsetse fly avoidance — the flies that infest the ground vegetation of the lake shore are significantly less prevalent at height — and the cooling effect of the breeze in the tree canopy during the hottest part of the day. Whatever the reason, the effect is one of the most extraordinary and most photographically irresistible wildlife spectacles available anywhere in Tanzania, and finding a pride of lions spread across the branches of a large fig tree in the dappled light of the lakeshore forest is an experience that every visitor to Manyara who witnesses it describes with a particular delight and a particular disbelief that somehow only increases with each retelling.

The Groundwater Forest: A Green Cathedral

The groundwater forest that lines the western shore of Lake Manyara and forms the park’s most distinctive habitat zone is one of the most beautiful and most ecologically extraordinary forest environments in Tanzania — a dense, lush, permanently green woodland sustained not by rainfall but by the groundwater seepage from the Great Rift Valley escarpment above, creating a forest of remarkable richness and remarkable variety in an otherwise semi-arid landscape.

The forest supports an extraordinary diversity of wildlife — troops of olive baboons up to several hundred strong move through the forest and onto the lakeshore flats in a constant, noisy, socially complex spectacle of primate life; blue monkeys inhabit the forest canopy with a quieter, more elegant grace; bushbuck, warthogs, and bushpigs move through the understorey; and the bird life of the forest is extraordinarily rich, with trumpeter hornbills, silvery-cheeked hornbills, crowned eagles, and dozens of species of smaller birds creating a constant, layered symphony of calls that fills the forest with an atmosphere of abundant, vibrant life.

The Rift Valley Escarpment: A Dramatic Backdrop

The Great Rift Valley escarpment that forms the western boundary of Lake Manyara National Park rises dramatically from the park floor to a height of approximately 600 metres above the lake, creating a backdrop of geological grandeur that gives every view within the park a sense of scale and drama that no flat landscape can produce. The escarpment is visible from virtually everywhere in the park, its dark, volcanic face rising above the forest canopy and the pale shimmer of the lake with a permanence and a solidity that anchors the landscape and reminds the visitor of the deep geological processes — the tectonic forces that have been slowly tearing the African continent apart for millions of years — that created this extraordinary rift valley environment.

When to Visit Lake Manyara

The dry season from June through October offers the finest game viewing conditions, with the woodland vegetation thinning and wildlife concentrating around the remaining water sources. The wet season transforms the park with extraordinary lushness and brings the largest flamingo concentrations to the lake shore, with hundreds of thousands of birds turning the shallow margins pink in a spectacle of such overwhelming visual beauty that it justifies a visit to the park at this time of year entirely on its own merits.

Manyara as the Perfect Introduction

Lake Manyara National Park is, for many travellers, the perfect first day of a Tanzania northern circuit safari — a relatively compact, comprehensively rewarding introduction to the extraordinary diversity of Tanzania’s wildlife and landscape that builds anticipation and sets the tone for the greater experiences of the Serengeti and Ngorongoro that follow. It is also, for those who give it the time and attention it deserves, a destination of genuine, independent excellence — a park that stands entirely on its own merits and delivers an experience of beauty, variety, and wildlife wonder that would satisfy any safari traveller even in the absence of everything that surrounds it.