Tanzania Ngorongoro and Serengeti Route: Lake Manyara to Olduvai Gorge

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Lake Manyara

   The Great Rift Valley has a wall, and at Lake Manyara it stands about six hundred metres high, a green escarpment rising behind the shallow soda lake like the side of a great bowl. The lake is alkaline and shallow, and its edges are fringed with groundwater forest, where giant mahogany and fig trees shade a floor of tall grass. Elephants, buffalo, giraffe and baboons use the forest, and flamingos, pelicans and other water birds gather on the water in vast numbers when conditions are right. The park is also famous for its tree-climbing lions, which lounge on the branches of acacia trees, a habit that is rare elsewhere.

   Read the complete Lake Manyara write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Lake Manyara is where the day begins. Next is Ngorongoro Crater rim.

2. 2. Ngorongoro Crater rim

   On the rim of Ngorongoro the first thing that hits you is the cold. At around 2,300 metres the air is thin and damp, the forest is wrapped in mist most mornings, and the wind whips over the edge of the caldera with a bite that surprises people who think of Africa as hot. Then the mist tears and the floor appears about six hundred metres below, a vast grassy bowl twenty kilometres across, with a lake glinting in the middle and tiny dots of animals scattered over the plain. It is one of the great views on the planet, and it takes a while to understand the scale.

   Read the complete Ngorongoro Crater rim write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Ngorongoro Crater rim comes up about 107 km into the recorded legs. Nothing on this route is higher. Next is Olduvai Gorge, mostly downhill.

3. 3. Olduvai Gorge

   Olduvai Gorge is a scar across the dry plains of northern Tanzania, about forty-eight kilometres long and nearly a hundred metres deep, and what it holds is nothing less than the story of our own beginnings. The walls of the gorge expose layers of volcanic ash and sediment laid down over almost two million years, and in them Louis and Mary Leakey, working over decades, found stone tools and the bones of early humans. In 1959 Mary Leakey uncovered a skull of an early hominin, now called Paranthropus boisei, and later work produced remains of Homo habilis, one of the first members of our own genus.

   Read the complete Olduvai Gorge write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   The route ends here after 164 km.