Trail Log 1995-1997 - Lamar at Colorado State University

20
years. They have leaves only in the rainy season. They cannot survive frosts. According to the
Palgrave book on trees (see below), the tree is short and grotesquely fat. There may be annual
rings or a sort and large ones may be 3,000 years old.
Namaqua dove, seen at dusty roadside, small and long tail.
This drive is now through the Rift Valley. The country becomes again better watered. There are
even some rice fields in wet areas that catch a lot of rain before an escarpment.
Lilac-breasted roller
Yellow necked spurfowl
Helmeted guinea fowl
seedeater
We reached village of Mto-wa-Mbu, a rather picturesque and very much Third World village. There
is a market for crafts here; we stopped at it on the return trip. The name of the village means
"mosquito," or, by some accounts, "gnats." Beyond town, we climbed the escarpment, with a big
washout in the lower part of the road, and a rough road the whole way; often you could only creep
along on it. Eventually we reached the flat summit of the scarp, and drove on a couple kms. to
Lake Manyara Lodge, on the western edge of the Rift Valley escarpment. The lodge overlooks
Lake Manyara, far below and 2 km away. The Rift Valley forms a chain of great lakes, including
this one. The lodge generates its own power, turned off between 12.00 a.m. and 5.00 a.m. The
lodge was once operated by the Tanzanian government, they failed, and turned it over to private
hands.
June 30, Friday. Generally cloudy in the morning, later brighter.
There are 120 different tribes in Tanzania. Peter is from the Mbulu district and a member of the
Iraqw tribe.
We returned down the rough escarpment road, going to Lake Manyara for the morning. Driving
down the road, the lodge could be seen in the distance (pix). Now we could make out thousands
of flamingoes at the edge of the lake, mostly seen as a kind of pink haze in the distance, though
with binoculars you could see that they were flamingoes. Later we were to see them closer up.
2 waterbucks, in the distance, below, from the road.
Stopped and took pictures of a woman named Elizabeth, carrying an 80-pound bag of charcoal to
the market to sell for perhaps $ 2, walking round trip 12 miles to do so.
Reached bottom of the scarp, and entered Lake Manyara National Park.
There is quite a dense forest here, with large trees, perhaps the most dense forest we saw in Africa.
12 baboons. These are olive baboons, as the drivers called them; though there seem to be two
species here, the yellow baboon, Papio cynocephalus, the commonest in Kenya, and probably this
one; also there is the Anubis or olive baboon, Papio anubis, also found in Kenya. (Anubis was a
jackal-god in Egypt, whose pictorial representation the baboon was thought to resemble.) Later
in South Africa they were chacma baboons, Papio ursinus, though, despite the book drawings,
there seems to be little evident difference between them.