Lake Manyara National Park is usually added to safaris as an afterthought, to pad out the main attractions and the Serengeti and Ngorongoro National Parks. The reason for this is probably that most people on safaris just want to see large mammals: lions, elephants, giraffes, and so on. These are harder to spot at Lake Manyara, because, unlike the other parks in the Northern Circuit, it's wet year-round, so that it can support dense foliage, which, in some places, makes it impossible to see more than a few yards from the road. We saw some elephants and hippos while we were there, but we never caught a glimpse of the famed, tree-climbing lions (though we saw some in Tarangire). We didn't care, because what Lake Manyara does have is a tremendous population of smaller animals, and the largest number of bird species I've ever seen in one place.
The drive to the lake was exciting; we passed lone elephants and giraffes munching on the trees, baboons loitering like surly teenagers in the road, and a troop of shy, chirpy blue monkeys. As the road began to follow a stream, the bird-life got denser, and we saw lots of the splendid sunbirds, as well as several species of toucan-like hornbills. Two kinds of kingfishers, one sapphire, the other emerald, dipped into the stream, and an African hoopoe flashed by. White cattle egrets trotted after some zebras, and oxpickers, with red and orange bills, sat on the backs of hippos. Swallows chased after the mosquitoes, and black glossy ibises shone like oil slicks.
And then we got to the lake and entered bird heaven.
There's a gravel car park where you can get out of the jeep at the edge of the lake. The water of the vast lake begins a few feet from the edge of the gravel, weedy and odiferous, and about 20 yards away sit the beginnings of an apparently endless carpet of birds: white pelicans and pink pelicans sitting motionless on a sandbar, cormorants, sandpipers in the mud, dozens of kinds of ducks, hideously wattled marabou storks with six-foot wing-spans, a thousand gray herons stalking fish, yellow-billed and saddle-billed storks and spoonbills stirring up the bottom, and a pink stripe of flamingoes along the horizon. One lone fish-eagle circled overhead; I can't imagine why there weren't more predators, maybe they were all full. There were Egyptian ducks, looking like they've been tastefully painted, and dark and light ibises looking like Egyptian wall-paintings. Distant impala and buffalo grazing on the reedy shore were shadowed by cattle egrets.
Lake Manyara was the last park we visited. After all our encounters with lions and cheetahs, we had expected an anti-climax. We were wrong.