Day 4 Tanzania on the road to Lake Manyara game preserve

After a sad good bye to the Tree Tops Tent Camp and our new friend, Lembris (whose name means grace in his native language), we headed off into the sunrise on our slow trek north through Tanzania. Next stop, Lake Manyara!








A side bar regarding Lake Manyara......
This is a shallow lake, but considered by many to be the most beautiful in all of Africa It is located in the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania and is very alkaline (pH about about 9.5). It covers 89 square miles and is home to baboons, hippos, impalas, elephants, wildebeests, buffalo, and giraffes. Most of the enormous ficus and mahogany trees draw water from underground springs which is also how this lake gets its water.

The flora in this area was quite different than that of the Tarangire and the view of the gorgeous Rift Valley escarpment affords a dramatic backdrop to the lake. In this area we do not see the ancient Baubab trees but we do see the Sycamore ficus and the yellow barked acacia.







As we drove we saw trees with scores of storks in each branch, eerily redolent of an old Alfred Hitchcock movie! In my experience, it is most unusual to see a single stork, but to see hundreds of them populating the branches of fig trees was amazing.

A highlight of this day was seeing the thousands of migratory birds such as:
pelican, storks, egrets, pink flamingos. The flamingos were so numerous that, at a distance, they looked like a pink pond within the larger lake!

Herds of hippo, impala, zebra and wildebeest (for where there are zebras there will be wildebeests) were very large.


The animals in this region tended to be closer to the dirt roads so it was easier to observe the behaviors up close. We had to stop several times to wait for herds of elephants to cross the road. A baby elephant got separated from its mother and panicked trying to cross to her safely. Once he found her he huddled directly under her enormous body for protection. Elephants are very good mothers.

Side bar about elephants: The female elephants and their young roam together for food and protection. All of the females co parent the babies. It's a lovely and moving phenomenon to watch....Guess that it indeed "takes a village" to raise an elephant.







In the afternoon, Ephata took us to see the family of an Iraq tribe. These people are among the descendants of four tribes that converged in the area. According to Ephata, there was much fighting between the Maasai and the Iraq people with each group claiming that the other stole its cows. In Tanzanian tribal cultures, cows are the currency used for barter, buying wives, and generally marking the wealth of a tribe. Cows are very important! At some point, the two made peace with one another and now there is even a bit of intermarrying going on among the youth!

Anyway, I digress. The Iraq family was most interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, the alpha male wore a Cleveland Indian t shirt under his tribal swaddling wrap. He spoke the King's English while his wife wore traditional African and spoke no English. His wife showed us some of her home made crafts including a leather and beaded wedding wrap (for sale) and several sweet grass baskets (similar to those sold in So. Carolina).

While this whole experience was calculated as a tourist trap, it proved to be educational.
The man boasted that his wife the "mama" was his one and only spouse and that they have 4 children. The wife has several young female "helpers" for her various jobs (which seem to be legion). She is responsible for the children, growing crops, keeping the house, milking the cows that have not been stolen by the Maasai (ha), and weaving baskets in her spare time.

At one point, the "mama" draped the wedding garment on me over my western clothes. She got so close to me that I could detect the lingering smell of spoiled mother's milk on her clothing!
We didn't buy the proffered garment, but we did purchase a couple of her baskets. BTW she was allowed to keep the money for her baskets!
It made me wonder what the "papa's" responsibilities might be, other than edifying tourists and collecting t shirts of American
baseball teams.

We stayed in another coffee plantation this night called Gibbs Farm. Lovely place!