Lake Manyara

Manyara is small — 330 square kilometres, two-thirds of it water when the lake is full — but it stacks more habitat into that space than parks ten times the size. You enter through groundwater forest fed by springs running off the Rift wall, where blue monkeys and one of Africa's largest baboon troops move through fig and mahogany. Within twenty minutes the forest opens onto floodplain, then acacia woodland, then the pale soda shore of the lake itself.

Hemingway called this stretch of Tanzania the loveliest he had seen in Africa, and the escarpment rising some 600 metres behind the park still does most of that work. It is also one of very few Tanzanian parks licensed for night drives, and one of the only places where lions have a documented habit of draping themselves along the limbs of acacia and sausage trees through the heat of the afternoon.