The flamingoes feed on the Spirulina algae abundant in the waters of Lake Natron and which pigments give the birds feathers their pink color. Lake Natron is the most important flamingo breeding place on earth. The lake is home of more than a million of flamingoes, more particularly the pinkish white plumage Lesser Flamingoes : indeed it provides food and breeding place for these birds which are outright suited to the hard environment of a volcanic lake.
#Lake natron camp tanzania full
It is a large soda lake (water full of sodium carbonate) that seems hostile to any living creature, except for an endemic species of fish, the alkaline tilapia, and also for the Spirulina a blue-green algae with red pigments, micro-organism the flamingoes feed on. Located at 610 m on the Great Rift Valley Escarpment in Northern Tanzania, Lake Natron is adjacent to the extinct Gelai Volcano and near the active Oldoinyo Lengaï. The modern world has now an influence on the traditional society by new emerging forms of employment including farming, business such as running shops, restaurants, campsites, tourist guides, selling art and crafts –beadwork and jewellery, small wooden stools, knives and traditional clothing-, etc.Īll the same, Maasai people are determined to keep their independance and the attachment to their traditions, their culture. It is the women’s responsability to build houses and to keep family and home, while men are in charge of boma and family security and boys of herding livestock. The Maasai Boma is the village surrounded by a fence made of acacia thorns to prevent wildlife from attacking cattle. They live in circular houses –Inkajijik- (in Maasai language), made of boughs cemented with mud, cow dung, and loaf-shaped. They speak Maa language, an east nilotic language and are also educated in swahili and english. The cattle is the primary source of income for the Maasai.
Livestock such as cattle, sheep, goats are central to the livelihood of the Maasai people and represents their main wealth. They have resisted in being imposed a more sedentary way of life. On their migratory way South, they have been regarded for their strength and their high warrior performances. The Maasai are pastoralists and semi-nomadic people. Maasai people have nilotic origin, and they migrated South in the fifteenth century, from the Nile Valley in Egypt and Soudan to reach in the seventeenth century Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania where they live now. In the process of splitting the African plate in two new separate plates, the Great Rift Valley in East Africa has been a great source of discoveries in human evolution : particularly evident at the site of Olduvai Gorge East of the Serengeti Plains and Laetoli, with the discoveries by the archeologists Leakey of some of the earliest remains of fossil hominids in 1959 and later. It is a huge fault formed in the earth’s crust and dotted with both active and extinct volcanoes. It is a geological feature stretching from Syria inthe north andspreading southward in EastAfrica from Ethiopia, through Kenya and Tanzania to Mozambique. Lake Natron area is a dry and above all an hauntingly beautiful area ! Be sure to plan some days in this magnificent zone and your stay will be an outstanding experience.
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