Lake Manyara National Park, Tanzania | A Complete Guide

At the foot of the cliffs of the Manyara Escarpment, on the border of the Rift Valley, is Lake Manyara National Park. Here you will find a variety of habitats, amazing birds and spectacular scenery.

Lake Manyara National Park is well worth a trip in its own right en route to Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Its ground water forests, bush plains, baobab-strewn cliffs and algae-streaked hot springs provide wonderful ecological variability within a small region, rich in fauna and huge numbers of birds.

Lake Manyara runs 50km at the base of the rusty-gold 600 metre high Rift Valley escarpment, and is a picturesque gem, with a setting lauded by Ernest Hemingway as ‘the best I had seen in Africa’.

The narrow game-viewing circuit through Manyara is a virtual microcosm of the Tanzanian safari experience.

The park’s famous tree-climbing lions are one of the main reasons why visitors pay a visit to the jewel. Apart from the lions, the national park also has the greatest population of baboons anywhere in the world, which makes for interesting sightings of large families of the primates. Here you may see also buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, olive baboon, blue monkey, klipspringer, lions, elephant, hippos.

On the brackish waters of Lake Manyara’s alkaline soda an astonishing diversity of birdlife thrives. Over 400 species have been recorded. Highlights include thousands of pink flamingos on their eternal migration, and other huge water birds including pelicans, cormorants and storks.