Lake
Eyasi

The Cultural Wilderness

Lake Eyasi offers something no other destination on the Northern Circuit can match — an intimate encounter with the Hadzabe, one of the last true hunter-gatherer societies remaining on Earth.

Nestled beneath the Ngorongoro highlands in the heart of the Rift Valley, Lake Eyasi is a shallow, seasonal soda lake fringed by acacia woodland and rocky escarpment. It sits at around 1,000 metres elevation and covers roughly 1,050 km² in the dry season, shrinking dramatically when the rains come. The landscape is raw, silent, and deeply atmospheric — far removed from the tourist trails of the Serengeti.

The Hadzabe people have lived along the shores of Lake Eyasi for tens of thousands of years, surviving entirely by hunting with handmade bows and gathering wild plant foods — a way of life essentially unchanged since the Stone Age. Spending a morning hunting with the Hadza, listening to their click-language songs around a fire, or watching them identify edible roots by smell alone is one of the most humbling and extraordinary experiences in Africa. The lake shore is also home to the agro-pastoral Datoga tribe, master blacksmiths who forge arrowheads traded to the Hadza.