On Safari
Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro & Serengeti, Tanzania
March 2001
Well,
I couldn't go to Tanzania and not go to some of the world's most famous wildlife
reserves. So, in between projects I went on a three day safari in Lake
Manyara and Ngorongoro and later took a day trip into the Serengeti.
Lake Manyara is one of Tanzania's smallest national parks and is really quite nice. It is mostly forested and the animals are fairly tame, coming quite close.
The Ngorongoro crater is absolutely spectacular. At about 20km across it's a huge enclosed plain, in places offering wall-to-wall wildlife. However, while it's great for seeing the animals, at times it feels like a big open air zoo. The wildlife is very tame -- the lions even come and sit in the shade of the vehicles -- and after about 11am herds of white safari trucks are a common sighting.
I visited Serengeti from the western end which is rarely reached by most tourists. This showed in the nervousness of the animals as we approached, which made the whole trip seem a bit more of an adventure.
Between the three parks I saw just about everything there was to see, except for cheetahs. Elephants, lions, buffalo, rhinos and leopards make up "the big five", although I only saw the latter two at a distance. I also saw hippos, wildebeest (gnu), zebra, giraffe, crocodiles, various types of antelopes, baboons, blue monkeys, vervet monkeys, hyenas, jackals, dwarf mongooses, warthogs, and lots of different types of birds.
 Baboon |
 Blue monkey |
 Ostrich |
 Crowned cranes |
 Flamingo |
 Wildebeest (Gnu) |
 Elephant |
 African buffalo |
 Zebras |
 Water bucks |