The lions in this part of Tanzania climb trees. It's the first thing the guide tells you as you enter the dense lush mahogany and acacia forest. They're scared of the elephants, it seems.
It's not the best news to hear when you're on your way to stay in a tree lodge. Prepared for rope ladders and rickety tree houses safely out of reach of any marauding animals, I hadn't expected to be bedding down with a couple of frightened lions.
Lake Manyara National Park, home to the lodge, is a long sliver of fertile land squeezed in between the sudden wall of the Rift Valley to the west and the great soda lake to the east. It's straight out of every African adventure story - hanging waterfalls, brightly-coloured birds the size of small dogs and thousands of pink flamingos. There are hanging vines as thick as your arm, giant trees thousands of years old. Think Jurassic Park, but with better special effects.
Two hours' drive towards the southern-most end of this forest, after you've crossed rivers, hot springs and hills, lies a 10-acre plot of utter luxury: Lake Manyara Tree Lodge, run by the eco-friendly company Conservation Corporation Africa. The central lodge is a grand affair on three levels, open to the forest with a woven palm-leaf thatch, dining room and bar serving excellent iced G&Ts. Surrounding the entrance is a circular boma , the traditional Masai defence against wild animals, built from branches.
When the Masai first moved here they too had a problem with elephants and lions. Rather than building themselves a luxury tree-house retreat, they used the local manyara tree to build their bomas and found it worked so well they stayed, naming the area after the tree. Now they seem to spend a lot of their time standing around looking statuesque and preventing pasty tourists from being eaten.
Arriving at the lodge, you're greeted by the Manyara 'family'; a kind of Tanzanian version of the Waltons. There are cooks and guides and Masai warriors and the manager all shouting ' Karibu! Welcome!' After a chilled glass of tamarind juice it's off into the forest to find my lodge, accompanied by my butler, Abdallah. He's a mixture of the efficiency of Jeeves and the camp high-spiritedness of Manuel from Fawlty Towers . It's his job to bring me coffee and fruit in bed each morning, serve me at dinner and generally make my life easy.
There are 10 lodges dotted around the forest, each sleeping two, but you'd never know there was anyone else within hundreds of miles. Each lodge is on stilts up in the boughs of the mahogany trees (accessible by stairs: not a rope ladder in sight). It's all very romantic.
Inside, the bed is a vast and sumptuously illicit affair, big enough for three (if that constitutes romance) and the room is decked out with bleached wood furniture and floors. I was there in time for Valentine's Day. Alone. I think I now know how Tarzan must have felt before he met Jane.
There are two things I always do when I check into a new hotel (Travelodges excepted). The first is to take in the view from the balcony or window. The second is to take a shower. Here I could do both at the same time. The shower, you see, is outside, in the tree canopy. You stand, naked to the elements, under a mini rain cloud in a mahogany tree, with blue monkeys playing around you in the branches. I managed to suppress the urge to yodel into the forest and beat my chest, but it was a near thing.
While the rooms are enough to bring you here, it's worth getting out to track down those stampeding elephants and timid lions. I went out at around 4pm with Casmir, my guide. Like everyone who visits, apparently, I was only interested in seeing a lion. Preferably up a tree (so long as it wasn't my tree). Casmir had other ideas; he was into 'birding' and was determined that I would be too.
An admission: I hate even the thought of bird-watching. It's about as interesting as train and plane and wet-paint spotting. But, I loved it. Black Bishops in sleek black jack ets with luminous orange bellies. Kingfishers dive-bombing streams, even a peregrine falcon ('the fastest of all birds' - Casmir, in an excited whisper) eating something large and unfortunately slow.
As most visitors take a tour around several different safari lodges throughout Tanzania and East Africa, the forest environment can make a nice change from the well-known Serengeti further west. There is little open space here, no wide Out Of Africa vistas or roaming herds of wildebeest, but that's part of its distinctive charm. On the first evening we drove down to the lake through huge acacia trees and walked out to the water's edge to stare into the hazy distance and listen to the raucous calling of the flamingos and storks. Along the shoreline giraffe ranged about like a bizarre Dali-esque joke and mean-looking buffalo kept an eye on us.
This is the area in which Ian Douglas-Hamilton did his famous research into elephants in the Sixties and Seventies and you can see why: there are hundreds of them. And you can get very close. In fact, as Casmir edged the Land Cruiser closer I found myself pressed deep into my seat hardly breathing. An elephant is just an elephant until it's close enough to touch. Then it becomes AN ELEPHANT.
Despite weighing an average of around six tons (more than enough to crush a vehicle), they can vanish with ease. Hide-and-seek seems to be an elephant's favourite pastime. When you see one quietly grazing there are almost certainly another 20 lurking behind a nearby tree.
After three days deep in the forest I'd adapted to treetop living and thought nothing of seeing monkeys pass my window instead of the number 22 bus. I was sorry to leave.
Casmir and I pulled away from the group merrily waving farewell. As we headed for the airstrip, we turned a corner and there, up in the branches of a large acacia, lay two dozy lions. By this point I was so comprehensively of the birding persuasion, I'd forgotten I even wanted to see a lion. Still, nice to know they can actually do it.
Factfile
ITC Classics (01244 355527) can tailor-make packages to the Lake Manyara Lodge, combining it with other safari lodges in Tanzania or Kenya. A three-night stay at Lake Manyara combined with four nights at the Grumeti Camp in Tanzania, with full-board accommodation, all transfers, game drives, picnics and BA flights to Nairobi costs £2,656 per person, based on two sharing.
