Category: Lake Manyara

Manyara Journey

Manyara Journey

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Lake Manyara National Park is small, often congested, yet still one of my favorite game drives. But she’s a fickle place; either very good or pretty forgettable.

We drove from Tarangire Treetops to Lake Manyara in about two hours, and it would have been shorter except for the requisite stop at the Mto-wa-Mbu market. If I’ve been criticized for anything throughout my career as a guide, it’s been that I don’t give people enough time for shopping.

But this stop was particularly productive. Ken Winge, the owner with his wife, Sandy, of one of Galena’s finest little stores (Galena Wine & Cheese) has adopted woodworking as his life’s avocation. Any visitor to his beautiful new workshop/barn can’t help but think he’s preparing his living space as a future museum.

Ken wanted not just some of the beautiful curios you can buy, but some of the raw wood so that he, too, could fashion something. That’s not the easiest assignment I’ve ever been given! A lot of the wood carvings found throughout the circuit come from woodworkers far away. And those that do have “workshops” nearby have difficulty themselves getting the wood.

I learned from Ken that the common names we’ve all been using aren’t really correct. I’m a particular fan of rosewood, or at least what everyone here calls rosewood. They make especially beautiful bowls and I admit that this safari I acquired a curio myself, a rosewood elephant!

Final analysis has to await something more scientific, but Ken’s first impression is that rosewood is actually bubinga, much lighter than true rosewood. He also believes that most of what we call ebony is African blackwood. The new nomenclature doesn’t diminish the beauty or rarity of the wood, by the way.

Well, Ken found his hunks of African blackwood since my lead driver, Tumaini Meisha, happened to bump into a cousin near the market who took Ken’s artistic motivations to heart, and guided him through both the miasma of curio stalls then the ultimate bargaining.

We entered Manyara shortly afterwards and how different it was from 12 days ago! The low lake level remained a final indication that the season has been very dry, but it had to have been raining hard for the last several days. The veld was beautifully green running from the lake shore to the woods, and the streams were all nearly full. Where we had seen only a handful of hippos at the famous entry of the largest stream to the lake 12 days ago, this day we counted more than 60!

On the plains were dozens and dozens of giraffe, zebra and wildebeest. In the forests were fabulous elephants, and the red and yellow bishops were back. Frankly, I don’t know where they want last time, and it makes me realize that game viewing might have a strong psychological component to it. The bishop birds never leave Manyara. They had to have been there my last visit, but perhaps we were just all so discouraged that we didn’t look carefully enough.

My son, Brad, was the first to spot the great silvery-cheeked hornbills, too. The park was in its full glory this day, and the one thing that never changes and was just as beautiful even during my last game poor visit, was the indescribable forests of towering podacoprus, mahogany, and tangles of intricate ironwood.

The feast for the eyes was more than sufficient. So it was sensory overload when less than a few hours later we stared down on Ngorongoro Crater from its first viewpoint!

E.Africa Drought?

E.Africa Drought?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

We abandon Lake Manyara because it’s too hot and dry. I think this is global warming.

We entered the park around 11:30a coming from Tarangire. A midday game drive in Lake Manyara for safaris traveling north from Tarangire to the crater is commonplace. We take a picnic lunch and sit by the lakeshore watching flamingoes.

We didn’t see any flamingoes. There wasn’t enough water in this usually giant lake for them. At the most famous place in the park, where a large stream runs into its northwest top drawing upwards of 100 hippo and hundreds of breeding birds, we saw around 20 hippo and no breeding birds.

The beautiful varied trees of Manyara were losing their leaves. And it was 95 F! After we guffed down our lunch, we raced out to the Karatu highlands where it was so much nicer.

Droughts have been a part of Africa for all of recorded history. We used to think of them as coming every ten years. But the last real drought in East Africa was in 1992-94, so we are certainly due. But many believe we’ll never get a normal drought, again. Rather, we’ll experience the unusual mini-droughts simultaneously with flooding nearby, which is wrecking havoc on this ecosystem.

Manyara is absolutely experiencing a drought. But Tarangire to the south, and Ngorongoro and the Serengeti to the north, are not having a drought. In fact, the southern Serengeti had some flooding yesterday.

In Laikipia in Kenya (the area in which Samburu is located), there was only one week of rains in November. Normally this area’s short rains begin in November and continue for 6 or 7 weeks. There were areas further to the east that missed the Short Rains altogether. The Ewaso Nyiro River which divides Samburu with Buffalo Springs national park that normally dries for only a week in October has been dry since January 12.

Yet in the Aberdare Mountains, a mere 45 air miles south of Samburu, it was pouring when we were there, and at least for a diagonal strip that we explored from The Ark towards the west edge of the park, it was lush and well watered.

I remember in February, 2007, the first time in memory that the Serengeti was parched at that time (except during the years of drought, and 2007 was definitely anything but a drought). Unschooled observers thought was just an interlude between short and long rainy seasons. (And it down poured before and after.)

This was dead wrong, at least historically. The “short rain-long rain” climate area has been restricted to areas east of a north-south line from Nairobi to Arusha. West of this line was a single rainy season the first half of the year followed by a dry season the last half (where the Serengeti lies). This is beautifully illustrated on a large display at the Serengeti park gate at Naabi Hill.

That difference in a relatively small area highlights the microclimate tendencies of an equatorial region. But now it’s being accentuated. The clear line that divided the two climatic zones is being fractured. And to confuse things further, when it rains, it pours. When it’s dry, it’s a drought. And all of this is happening in an extremely small area from a meteorological perspective.

I asked one of my clients on this safari, George Halley, to help me understand if this was unusual. George is a farmer in Illinois with 3000 acres of corn harvested annually. He explained that not too many years ago his area was completely dry, whereas ten miles away they had more than 4″ of rain in a short time. So to a certain extent, then, micro climates happen everywhere, and always have.

Are we just, then, noticing them more? Or is it really global warming?

I think it’s global warming. George was uncertain if that climatic anomaly happened often in the past on the Illinois prairies. I know that it didn’t happen, here. Obviously not every square inch of ground got the same amount of rain as the next, but there certainly wasn’t as great a difference between Manyara and Tarangire as we all saw this week.

And the quick ending mini-droughts of the sort the Serengeti experienced in February, 2007, have little if any precedent. And certainly the torrential downpours that precede then follow these periods of exaggerated dryness are not historical.

For George and his genetically engineered corn group and state of the art drainage ditches, the effects are less severe than for the poor farmers in Manyara, whose crops are withering or washing away. I think that for those of us who enjoy a better station in life than the farmers in Manyara, we better take another very serious look at the effects of global warming.