We arrived at our mountain top hotel overlooking Lake Manyara National Park the night before our first game drive. Our hotel, which was a series of huts with thatched roofs, was spectacular. Each room was beautifully decorated and came with a giant bug net to keep all unwanted critters out. The pool, which sat on the edge of a cliff overlooking the lake, has the most striking view I have ever seen. One of the cool things about our hut was that it seemed to house a colony of geckos which would pop out from behind paintings and headboards every once in a while.
The next morning we awoke early, filled with excitement and anticipation, for our first game drive. Covered in layers of sunscreen and deet, we boarded our jeep (whose roof has been lifted so you could stand and see out the top of the car) and drove down the mountain to the entrance of Lake Manyara National Park. Just minutes into the park we were greeted by two very large elephants scaling the side of a very steep hill. Immediately out popped all the camera for what my brother calls the puffin effect (in Scotland, the entire group took hundreds of pictures of the first lone puffin they saw, only to realize that just around the corner were hundreds more).
Winding through the park we got to see many different animals such as elephants, giraffes, impalas, hippos, thousands of flamingos, warthogs and zebras. The coolest thing we saw was a loin in a tree (Lake Manyara is famous for having lions who live I trees), though he was sitting in a position which made him pretty hard to see unless you looked really hard. There were also some pretty spectacular birds, and lots of plants (which my dad needed to stop and take a picture of what seemed like every one). Unfortunately, since the drivable part of Lake Manyara National Park (aka the part that isn’t the lake) is pretty small, there were many Safari vehicles (we probably passed about 30) similar to what we were in, zooming around the place. This made it seem slightly less “wild” and more like a zoo, but never-the-less it was a pretty cool experience. It was here that it sunk in, for the first time, that I was really in Africa (it was one of those things that was so surreal it didn’t sink in until now). After returning to the lodge for a quick lunch (in which we were repeatedly harassed by some local birds who wanted our food), we set out to drive for 5 hours through Ngorongoro Park to Serengeti National Park.
Danielle
