29th – Lake Manyara

It was pouring down last night and when waking up it was pouring down. According to some of the others it hadn’t been raining throughout the entire night but it still meant that it was damp when coming outside in the morning. The plan was to meet up for breakfast at 0700 and leave at 0745, but as the breakfast wasn’t ready until 0715 meant that the morning schedule got pushed. No worries, though as we still had a couple of hours drive before arriving at our camp; Twiga Camp. Once again flashbacks to 4½ years ago.

We visited the local village with 120+ different tribes. We had a tour seeing how they lived, tasted banana beer (still horrible – sorry; still not to my taste) and fermented banana wine (not bad at all, actually, it was a bit like cider). We finished with lunch before being picked up and drove to Lake Manyara NP to do our first game drive. We saw large amounts of monkeys (baboons, blue- and vervet monkeys), buffalos far away, a few giraffes, zebras, wildebeest and not much else. Still a good drive, the amount of monkeys made up for the lack of cats.

Back in the camp we had dinner and afterwards we ended up in the bar. Tomorrow we will visit another Maasai village before driving 4-5 hours to Serengeti where we will have a short drive before arriving at our new camp in the early evening. Breakfast at 0700.

One of many irrigation channels going through the fields at the village.

Banana beer tasted just as I remember it. 

When they do the laundry they do it all.

Blue monkeys.

More blue monkeys.

Young baboon.

European roller.

Vervet monkey.

Egyptian goose.

Another very young baboon.

Zebra keeping an eye out.

This was just a small part of many large groups of baboons we encountered.