Entries about manyara

We had a wake-up call-which meant that they came to the tent and called to us as there were no phones.

Pathway in camp

It took two of them to get us in the wheelchair back down to breakfast.

Overlook in the morning

Granddaughter's watermelon breakfast

They had good banana shaped pancakes (long and thin rather than round). I liked them even though they were usually not hot.

pancake for breakfast

Then we picked our lunch from a buffet and loaded our luggage into the truck

loading the truck

Up to this point, my granddaughter had been using her cell phone for photos, but yesterday she discovered that a cell phone is not really adequate for wildlife, even as close as we would get. So she started using one of my cameras. Most of the photos of animals from here on are her photos taken with my camera with the 100-300 lens. I have a hard time using that camera as it is heavy and a day of using it gives me a sore neck.

We set off for Lake Manyara. On the way out we saw some more of the black and dark blue flags which they hang around the area treated with pesticide to kill the tsetse flies.

tsetse fly trap

Flies were very bothersome yesterday and we used some of the OFF wipes. I looked up sleeping sickness on the internet and it said that untreated it was 100% fatal. I told Jeremiah and he said that since the symptoms were like malaria, it was often misdiagnosed

I saw a tsetse fly on the back of the headrest and tried to take a photo of it but it did not stand out very well against the red and black check.

We saw vultures,

my vulture photo

my granddaughter's vulture photo

and then crossed a river and saw an

African fish eagle

a saddle-billed stork

I took a photo of one of the signs they have -the kind that the elephants can't tear up or push over (at least not easily)

Direction sign

Flowers

We left the park and I tried to take some photos of how they grow corn - they put squash or sunflowers in between the rows. (My photos weren't very good). We saw some more Maasai herds

cattle

cattle

Maasai

and then we went to Jeremiah's village.

Bananas

Roadside market

He stopped to give his mother something where she was volunteering at a clinic, and showed us where he went to school, and he also bought a paper showing the con-joined twins dying. He also bought some red skinned bananas for us to try.

red skinned banana

My granddaughter does not like bananas that much.

We saw more baboons

Baboons

baboon

Baboon

Baboon

baboon

and impala and my granddaughter got some better photos of them.

Impala

impala

impala

impala

impala

impala

impala

Then we saw a pair of wart hogs,

wart hogs

wart hogs

and herds of zebra,

zebras

zebras

wildebeest (Gnu)

Gnu

Gnu

The beard of the gnu

and also the Cape buffalo - the ones where the males have the big horns. There were cattle egrets around them.

Buffalo herds

Buffalo

(These are not water buffalo-water buffalo are bigger, have bigger horns and are not as bad tempered so they are not as dangerous, having been domesticated. Plus water buffalo are from Asia and not Africa)

I took a couple of photos of termite mounds.

termite mound

One of the roads we started down had been washed out so we had to turn around. .

We stopped for a picnic lunch.

I had potato salad, meat loaf sandwich (which they called roast beef), a hard boiled egg, something that was like a brownie, and ginger cookies

On the way out of the park we saw a giraffe,

Giraffe

more baboons,

The baboon baby eyes would roll up in his head so that the eyes were just white (like Orphan Annie), but we did not get a photo of that.

Baboon baby

and some sweet elephants with two babies. One had no tusks and one had just little nubbins.

Elephants

Elephant babies

elephants

Elephants

Then we left that park and climbed the escarpment

View

and tonight we are at the Bashray Rift Lodge. We had a nice room

Bashray Rift bedroom

with a balcony, and I asked my granddaughter to go out and take a photo of the balcony. The door had a latch at the top and bottom and she was too short to reach, so she stood on her suitcase to open the top latch so she could get the photo.

balcony

bathroom

Main room Bashray Rift

We went up to the bar for dinner, but the dining room had four steps with no hand rails and I did not think I could do them, so they brought a table down and served our dinner in the bar.

Dinner table in the bar

It was very noisy because there was a group of 19 Italians having a meeting in the bar and doing a lot of cheering.

Italians meeting

The appetizer was a stuffed tomato - stuffed with a soup I think.

Appetizer

Granddaughter with appetizer

Then we had meat and a kind of spinach and mashed potatoes in a shell which was bread crumbs.

dinner

Granddaughter at dinner

There were lights above us which attracted moths, and one of them fell on my granddaughter's plate. I told her it was more protein (as a joke), but she texted her mother that she had not seen me eat any of them.
I had to go up to the bar to sent emails. The internet was excruciatingly slow and I cannot get AOL to come up at all