A shallow soda lake in the southern Rift Valley and home to the Hadzabe, one of the last hunter-gatherer peoples on earth, alongside Datoga pastoralists and blacksmiths.
The Hadzabe have lived in this basin for tens of thousands of years and their language, with its click consonants, is unrelated to any other. Perhaps 1,300 remain, of whom a few hundred still live primarily by hunting and gathering. Visiting means joining a hunting party on foot before dawn, at their pace, with no certainty of what you will find. Nearby the Datoga, pastoralists who arrived far more recently, work brass and scrap iron into arrowheads and jewellery in open forges. Lake Eyasi is a two hour drive from Karatu and adds a dimension to a northern circuit safari that wildlife alone cannot.
June to March. The lake is often dry from July onwards.
Wildlife and people in equal measure. Time with Maasai pastoralists, the Hadzabe hunter-gatherers of Lake Eyasi and Datoga…
Ten days across the full northern circuit including Lake Eyasi and the Serengeti west and north. Enough time to spend a full…
