Lake Manyara

Manyara is the smallest of the northern circuit's parks and the most legible. Stand at the viewpoint on the escarpment and you can see the whole of it laid out in bands: the rift wall dropping several hundred metres, then a dark belt of groundwater forest along its foot, then open floodplain, then the pale sheet of the lake. The park is that shelf. It is a few kilometres wide in most places and about fifty long.

The wall is the western scarp of the Gregory Rift, and it is the reason everything else is here. Rain falling on the highlands above sinks into porous volcanic rock, travels down through it and comes out as permanent springs at the base of the cliff — which is why there is closed-canopy forest in country that is otherwise dry. Nothing on the surface feeds it. The forest exists because of what is happening underground. UNESCO's description of the reserve names its characteristic trees: Trichilia roka, Croton macrostachyus and the yellow fever tree, Acacia xanthophloea — which got its name because Europeans blamed the tree for the malaria they caught in the wet ground it grows on.

The lake is a soda lake: alkaline, around pH 9.5, sitting in a closed basin with no outlet at all. Water arrives and leaves only by evaporation, which concentrates the salts and makes the water undrinkable and the shoreline white. It is also astonishingly shallow. A bathymetric survey in 2010 found an average depth of 0.81 metres and a maximum of about 1.18 — a body of water forty kilometres long that you could wade across. At full wet-season extent it reaches around 40 km by 15 km; in severe droughts it has dried up completely.

That variability is why published figures for the park disagree. TANAPA gives 648.7 square kilometres, of which 262.7 is lake; other sources give roughly 325 km² of land and 230 km² of water. Both are right at different moments, because the lake is not a fixed shape.

TANAPA's official slogan for the park is the home of tree-climbing lions, and the habit is real: lions here do lie up along the branches of acacia and sausage trees, and they have been photographed doing it since at least the 1970s. Two things are usually said about it that are worth correcting.

It is not unique to Manyara. The claim that tree-climbing lions exist in only two places on earth — here and the Ishasha sector of Queen Elizabeth in Uganda — is a travel-industry line, not a zoological one. Lions climb trees opportunistically across their range. What is unusual at Manyara and Ishasha is that it is habitual rather than occasional, which is a real distinction and a much smaller one.

Nobody knows why. The explanations offered — escaping ground heat, avoiding tsetse and other biting flies, getting a vantage point over the floodplain, or simply a learned habit passed down through prides — are all plausible and none is established. Anyone who tells you the reason with confidence is going beyond the evidence.

The third thing to know is that you will probably not see one. The park is small, the lions are few, and a lion in a tree is a matter of luck on the day. Treat it as a bonus rather than the reason for the visit; the visit has better reasons.

The lions have been studied here since early on. A survey published in 1969 recorded a density of about 0.4 lions per square kilometre, which at the time was close to double that of Ngorongoro Crater or Nairobi National Park — a reminder that this small park was once extraordinarily rich. No comparably authoritative recent count has been published, and we are not going to invent one.

Manyara's real claim is not the lions. It is that modern elephant science started here.

In 1965 a 23-year-old zoologist named Iain Douglas-Hamilton arrived to study the park's elephants, then numbering around 450 in a strip of land far too small for them. What he did was new: instead of counting animals, he learned to recognise them — by the notches in their ears and the shape of their tusks — and followed named individuals and families over years. Nobody had done that with African wildlife before. His thesis, The Ecology and Behaviour of the African Elephant: The Elephants of Lake Manyara, was completed in 1972, and the book he wrote with his wife Oria, Among the Elephants (1975), took the idea to a general audience.

Essentially everything since — that elephants live in matriarchal families, that they have individual histories and relationships, that you can only understand them by knowing who is who — descends from work done on this small shelf of land. Douglas-Hamilton went on to found Save the Elephants and to run the continental surveys that documented the ivory slaughter. He died at his home in Nairobi on 8 December 2025, aged 83.

The park then demonstrated the point in the worst way. Between 1985 and 1991 Manyara's elephants fell by about 75 per cent to illegal hunting for ivory, recovering to roughly 200 by 1996. The same decades took the park's other famous animal completely: Manyara was once known for its black rhino, and by 1996 there were none left.

Elephants are common and easily seen here today, often in the forest itself, which is an odd and memorable place to meet one.

The lake is a feeding ground for lesser flamingo, which filter the algae the alkaline water grows. The numbers, when they come, are hard to write down without sounding as though one is exaggerating: a count in 1991 estimated 1.9 million lesser flamingos, and surveys between 1991 and 1995 put total waterbirds somewhere between one and two and a half million. They are not always there — the birds move between the rift's soda lakes as water and algae shift — so this is a matter of season and luck rather than a fixture.

Beyond the flamingos, TANAPA records over 400 bird species in a park you can drive across in an afternoon, a density that comes from stacking forest, floodplain, lake and escarpment habitats within a few kilometres. The forest birds are the ones worth slowing for — silvery-cheeked hornbill in the canopy, palm-nut vulture near the doum palms.

The mammals split by habitat in the same way. The forest holds olive baboon in some of the largest troops recorded anywhere, along with blue monkey overhead and bushbuck below. The floodplain has buffalo, zebra, wildebeest, giraffe, warthog and impala, with hippo at the pools near the river mouths. Leopard are present and rarely seen.

There is also a hot spring. Maji Moto, on the western shore, is heated by the same volcanic rock that feeds the cold springs in the forest; TANAPA gives the water temperature as up to 76.5°C, hot enough to be dangerous, though some sources put it nearer 60. It is a curiosity rather than a bathing spot.

The park is 126 km south-west of Arusha, about ninety minutes on tarmac, and almost nobody comes here on its own account — it is the first or last stop on a northern circuit, an afternoon slotted in before the climb to Ngorongoro. The main gate is at the northern end, at Mto wa Mbu, where the road from Arusha meets the escarpment.

Fees are government-set and charged per 24 hours. TANAPA's published 2023/24 schedule puts Lake Manyara in the same band as Tarangire and Arusha: USD 50 for a non-East African adult in peak season, USD 45 in low, exclusive of 18 per cent VAT — so USD 59.00 and USD 53.10 in practice. East African citizens pay TZS 10,000. The low rate applies only between 15 March and 15 May. Payment is cashless, against a government control number.

What you can do here is unusually varied for a small park, and it is official rather than operator marketing — TANAPA lists game drives, night drives, walking safaris and canoeing, all with armed rangers. Canoeing depends entirely on the lake having enough water in it, which in a lake this shallow is not a given.

The canopy walkway is the other draw: a treetop bridge 470 metres long, rising to about 18 metres through the groundwater forest. It is a genuinely good way to see a forest most visitors only drive under, and it is one of the few things on the northern circuit that works for people who do not want to spend all day in a vehicle.

Half a day is the standard allocation and it is enough to see the park. A full day, with the walkway in the morning and the floodplain in the late afternoon, is better and costs one more park fee.

Manyara was a game reserve from 1957 and became a national park in 1960; a further 550 hectares were added at the southern end in 1974. UNESCO designated the Lake Manyara Biosphere Reserve in 1981 under its Man and the Biosphere programme — a different thing from a World Heritage Site, and one that covers the working landscape around the park as well as the park itself.

The designation matters because the park cannot function on its own. At 648.7 square kilometres, most of it water, it is too small to hold viable populations of large mammals by itself, and it has an unusually long boundary for its area — most of the park is edge. What keeps it working is what surrounds it: the Marang Forest Reserve (35,399 hectares) on the escarpment above it to the south, which is part of the same Important Bird Area, and the Kwakuchinja corridor running east through the Burunge Wildlife Management Area towards Tarangire, which elephant and buffalo use to move between the two parks.

That corridor is under pressure from cultivation and settlement, and it is the reason Manyara's future is not really decided inside Manyara. The lake's catchment is larger still — about 18,372 square kilometres rising to 3,633 metres — so what happens to the water here is decided on farmland a long way upstream.