Manyara

Manyara is a young administrative region — created in 2002 out of the southern districts of Arusha — but the country it covers is old and mixed. Its five districts run from Mbulu and Babati in the fertile highlands, through Hanang, to the dry Maasai rangelands of Simanjiro and Kiteto in the east and south.

The people are as varied as the land. The Iraqw are the largest group — Cushitic-speaking farmers of the Mbulu highlands, whose terraced hillsides and tight homesteads look unlike anything else in northern Tanzania. The Barabaig, a Datooga people, keep cattle on the plains around Mount Hanang. The Maasai graze the eastern steppe, and Mbugwe and Gorowa communities live between them.

Babati, beside its lake on the road south from Arusha, became the regional capital. It is a market town rather than a tourist one, and it is where the region's business is done.

The Iraqw highlands around Mbulu are the surprise of this region: cool, densely farmed country of ridges and terraces, with a language unrelated to those of the peoples around them. Iraqw houses were traditionally dug into hillsides with grass roofs at ground level, and the farming discipline of the area is visible from any ridge.

Around Katesh, under Mount Hanang, is Barabaig country — cattle people whose bomas and grazing patterns dominate the plains. Hanang itself, a dormant stratovolcano of about 3,420 metres, can be climbed from Katesh in a long day, and it is the fourth-highest mountain in the country after Kilimanjaro, Meru and Loolmalasin.

East, in Simanjiro and Kiteto, the country flattens into the Maasai steppe — thorn, dust and enormous horizons, with Tarangire's elephants moving in and out of it along the river as the seasons change.