Lake Manyara — Fat Chicken Meal

Honeymoon - Day 9

Leaving the Ngorongoro Sopa Lodge, where we stayed for 2 nights, we drove to the exit gate. African massage for today only lasted about half an hour. After passing through the gate, the guide exclaimed, "Now we can enjoy some European massage!". 😌 Last time we were on a paved road seemed to be a long time ago 😅

On the way to Lake Manyara, we stopped at a local crafts store and a view point. Someone approached Mr. Husband and successfully persuaded him to buy stuff. Nowadays this kind of thing doesn't happen to women only. 😉

Upon entering Lake Manyara national park, we saw this sign in the picture below. Sounds promising!

This national park isn't very big in terms of the places that you can go. The lake takes up the most part of this national park, and all kinds of water activities are prohibited. So, we could only drive around on the paths.

Maybe because it's closer to water, the vegetation here is quite different from Masai Mara, Serengeti and Ngorongoro. Some part of it looks more like tropical forest (like those we saw in Singapore and Malaysia) than the savanna we've seen in the past few days.

There are a lot of elephants, monkeys and birds in this park. We also saw a leopard crossing the road in front of our vehicle - unfortunately we didn't manage to take a video or photo. The guide said he's been to this park many times, but it's his first time seeing leopard there. It's also our first time to see a leopard on the ground. All those we've seen so far were all on the trees, and most of them sleeping. 😄

We stopped for lunch and then went to the Majimoto Boardwalk Way. It's a wooden bridge built on the shore of the lake.

Here's a 360 degrees video of Lake Manyara taken on the boardwalk:

Lake Manyara is quite nice and is a good place for bird watching. However, it's way less exciting than Serengeti or Masai Mara. If we would start from Arusha and this was our first place to visit, it might have been a good warm-up safari. But since we started with Masai Mara and then went to Serengeti, Lake Manyara became not as appealing to us. (I must admit that I've slept for a really long time after lunch...but Mr. Husband said I didn't miss anything 😆)

Before 4pm we already finished driving around the entire national park and headed to our accommodation of the night, Lake Manyara Serena Lodge. Unlike the national park, the lodge was the best we've had so far in Africa. 😊