Western National Parks & Reserves In Tanzania

Western National Parks & Game Reserves in Tanzania

Mahale National Park

Mahale Mountains National Park — is an outstanding African travel wilderness on many counts. It is inaccessible by road and must be reached by boat along the coast of Lake Tanganyika, the longest, deepest, oldest in Africa, and second largest freshwater lake in the world. The park comprises of 623 square miles (1613 sq. km), and begins with an idyllic coastal strip of silver sand approached through a shallow lagoon where the lake ferry, 100 year old MV Liemba, cannot venture but must transfer passengers and cargo to smaller boats to land. Behind the beach, the Mahale Mountains range rises to a dramatic peak at Mount Nkungwe, almost 2500 meters above sea level.

Above the cliffs stretch high altitude plains carpeted with wild flowers at first seasonal rainfalls. Cold air at the summit meets warm, moist air rising from the lake. Beautiful waterfalls tumble from the heights, cutting deep ravines filled with lush flora, stunning butterflies and rich avian life. This produces a complex range of eco-zones which accounts for its great diversity of mammalian life. Amongst these are tropical rain forest dwellers: Giant forest squirrels, scaly giant pangolin, shaggy red and the other black and white Colobus monkeys, brush-tailed porcupines and Sharpe’s grysbok. The park is justly famous for over 800 wild chimpanzees, more than any other East or Southern African park including the famed sister Gombe. Apart from the wild chimps, there is the M group of 60 or more who have been comfortable to human presence by Japanese researchers headed by the late Dr. Toshisada Nishida since the 1960s. These can often be seen on a Mahale chimpanzee tour with BookmySafary.com, but since they are vulnerable to many human diseases, strict rules are in place for the safe conduct of primate safaris in Tanzania.

Current research depends on following and observing the behavior of these chimps under natural conditions. Much has been learned, and activities identified that had previously only been encountered in human beings, such as self-medication by swallowing folded leaves with small spines to remove intestinal parasites, and eating medicinal herbs to counteract infections. Chimpanzees use tools such as grass stalks to poke in termite mounds for edible insects, make improvements, stripping straight sticks for the same purpose, and additionally pass on their evolved experience to others. In a second isolated habitat, extensive Miombo woodland with brachystegia and acacia, mammals include magnificent chestnut sable and stocky roan antelopes with thickly banded horns are hunted by highly elusive mountain leopards.

In a rare and highly inaccessible third area of flat savannah grasslands, plump zebra, impudent warthogs and supercilious giraffe are prey for prides of lordly but extremely rare lions. Fishing is permitted in the deep waters outside the offshore lake conservation area and away from the Mahale park lake boundary. In the dark night, lamp-lit flotillas of sardine fishing dhows make a romantic picture seen farther out from the shore.

Although Mahale is mainly a base for visitors to take part in a chimpanzee observation safari, there are many other activities on offer, from cultural and historical visits to nearby towns to simply chilling out in your own, private Shangri-La. Energetic wildlife enthusiasts may choose to spend the afternoons looking for some of the other nine primates in this location.

BookmySafary.com offers a special guided primate walking tour in western Tanzania, looking especially for the silver monkey and the shaggy red colobus. This begins with a 10 minute boat trip and follows a leisurely ramble of up to five hours, through differing eco-zones where you will appreciate the tremendous diversity of flora and fauna, especially the wonderful range of avian life and the amazing numbers of butterflies. The chimpanzee safari is a very different but primary experience. There is a habituated group whom you may approach.

Paper face masks that cover your nose and mouth may be provided by your accommodation and strict rules are enforced as to the time you can spend and the distance you must maintain between the famous M troop and yourselves. Small groups of six BookmySafary.com guests or less may only make one chimp trek a day and observe them for only an hour. Children under 12 are not allowed. But the rewards are well worth the strenuous uphill trek and the restrictions.

Your first intimation of their nearness is a growing chorus of pant-hoots, one of a variety of signals exchanged by the “mock men” as they were known to the earlier natives. As you round a bend, you may suddenly find yourself in a playground where a community of up to 60 individuals swing through the tree canopy, sit grooming each other against tree boles, or nurse and suckle their young. Infant chimpanzees are carried and suckled for their first five years, protected by their mothers from attack by other adults, jealous alpha males or dominant females. The community is no utopia, but rather like a human housing project where many inhabitants are peaceful and mutually supportive, but a few ambitious males fight for supremacy and a number of raucous youngsters get up to all kinds of mischief. Remember to keep your distance, move slowly and back away if any approach you. Morning or afternoon activities on an adventure tour in Mahale could include a kayak or dhow trip on Lake Tanganyika, or even fishing by regulated authorization outside the protected shallow coastal zone of the park where 400 species of fish, including varied cichlids, well-known aquarium favorites, 96% of which are found nowhere else in the world, swim in the shallow and deep waters. Snorkeling to view them is permitted unless there is danger from crocodiles or hippopotami. Liability waivers need to be signed on arrival!

Katavi National Park

Katavi National Park — Only a few hundred privileged and seasoned African safari enthusiasts can visit Katavi National Park each year. Arguably the most remote and unspoiled wildlife haven in Tanzania, at 4471 square kilometers (1727 square miles) in extent, this is the third largest wilderness area dedicated to the conservation of spectacular concentrations of indigenous mammals, including thousands of Cape buffalo, various antelopes, zebras, elephants, hippos, crocodiles and predators such as leopards, lions, cheetahs, hyenas and jackals. The endangered African wild dogs are also found here as well as many smaller felines, including the golden and wild cats, servals, caracals and civets. Smaller mammals include mongooses, hyrax, nocturnal bush babies and armored pangolins, as well as a rich diversity of lizards, snakes and frogs. Accessible only with great difficulty by road from Arusha, a journey of over 15-18 hours spanning over two days of driving, or conveniently by air from Arusha, a three-hour trip in a light charter aircraft, only the most determined and intrepid explorers make it to this last remnant of East Africa as it was known to our ancestors hundreds and thousands of years ago. At the end of an arm of the Great African Rift Valley, Katavi consists of linked flood plains of the meandering Katuma River and its fragile network of seasonal lakes and streams, contained within a tangled barrier of brachystegia miombo and acacia thorn trees to the east of Lake Tanganyika.

A dramatic change in conditions from the wet season to dry results in the disappearance of lakes and marshes, and the gathering of water-dependent wildlife close to vanishing water sources. The ecosystem that in the early rains is lush and gentle, rich with flowers, birds, insects, reptiles and graceful ungulates, gradually changes to a harsh, raw battleground where tiny streams, that are all that remain of the wide-spread waters, heave with pods of hundreds of grunting hippo and nests of slithering crocodiles up to five meters in length, all competing viciously for a cool dip in the life-giving wallows. In the heat of the midday sun, mud encrusted elephant step between boulders like tumbles of dormant prehistoric behemoths while lionesses sprawl on the cracked earth as if dropped from a great height. In the early morning and late evening, vast herds of grazing animals trek from their day-time forage grounds to brave waiting predators in a death-defying bid to find a sip of water to sustain them, making for spectacular photo safari opportunities as the daily drama unfolds. Because it is so remote, many more activities are permitted on an adventurous trip to Katavi than in other national parks in Tanzania. Off–road game driving, night drives, guided walks and fly-camping are all distinct ways to explore this fantastic, timeless Tanzanian dream tour destination.

Foremost among Katavi tour adventures is the game viewing drive. Whether you are photo stalking for a chestnut coated sable in the miombo thickets, on the lookout for rare birds or hoping to see a cheetah bring down a duiker, you need the services of an experienced and a BookmySafary.com approved local Katavi guide who knows exactly where to trail, look and spot unique and maximal wildlife viewing opportunities, and how to choose his strategic location and place his custom 4×4 vehicle exactly in the best line for the kind of shots that draw appreciative oohs and aahs from audiences at home. For safety in the open-sided vehicle with its tiered seating, you are protected by an overhead awning. Your expert guide is in 2-way contact with the home base and carries refreshments and accompaniments to keep you hydrated and partly filled until your next meal. In the wet, you may need to get out and push, but that is all part of the fun in this isolated venue where you learn to read the signals of the bush coached by your guide and then rely on yourself, trusting your own intuition. This is the Tanzanian bush 101 lesson of a safari walk, interpreting the sights, sounds and odors of the wild as you quietly stroll among the amazing, diverse denizens of mud flats, wallows and forest glades. Your guide will provide advice on various tactics to avoid attention from various “wild” fauna such as walking against the wind when approached by an elephant, or not running away from a sniffing buffalo or elephant as they will outrun you, or walk in a single file and avoid wearing bright colored clothing on any safari walk. Thus, walking is not for the fainthearted!

As you watch, a fierce mongoose may dart up behind a snake to fix needle-like teeth in the back of his head, shake him sharply and drag his lifeless body away to feed a baby brood. On an evening game drive, you may spotlight a pangolin, rolling into a scaly ball, pretending to be a stone, or a green-eyed leopard with her kill. For a less active Katavi safari, recline on your own verandah, seeing possibly more diverse game on the plains than you would in any other camp verandah in other parks in East Africa. The great advantage of Katavi is the range of permitted options. You can emulate the first explorers, striding across the veldt in sturdy boots, packing your dome fly tent, in company with an armed ranger and a guide, submerging yourself in the ambience of history in an area that has seen ivory and slave traders, gold miners and simple stone and iron age hunter-gatherers placating their heroes, like Katabi, with gifts left beneath ancient spirit trees, after which the park name derives from. Under your fly tent, relaxing into sleep, look up through the net as that is the only thing between you and the natural world, imagining the yesteryear generations who have dreamt under the same moon and stars.

Gombe National Park

Gombe Stream National Park — is legendary for the Kasakela community of wild chimpanzees which were studied by Dr. Jane Goodall for over 50 years, contributing to the drive to combine the preservation of primate wildlife habitats with the development of eco-tourism and the beneficial involvement of indigenous human communities in Tanzania. Set in a fringe of tropical rainforest on the fringes of Lake Tanganyika in western Tanzania, Gombe is a dream BookmySafary.com chimpanzee tour destination pioneered by the works of Dame Goodall, where it is possible to take guided forest treks to watch the chimps both at play and interacting socially. During her research time at Gombe, Jane made many new discoveries about chimpanzees, detailing their social hierarchy, their calls and previously unsuspected behavior. They hunted other primates such as red colobus monkeys for meat, communicated purposefully with one another and made and used simple tools. In 1960, when she was 26 years old, she observed one male she had named David Greybeard prodding in a termite mound with few straws of grass, to retrieve it laden with termites which he proceeded to eat. Later she saw him with another male, preparing twigs to use as tools to ‘fish’ for termites. Apart from the chimps, Gombe Park boasts many other attractions. The tanned sandy beaches of Lake Tanganyika, one of Africa’s oldest, largest and deepest lakes, at the end of an arm of the Great African Rift Valley, is one of the most stunning places to relax and enjoy sailing, snorkeling, fishing and simply chilling in the ambience of this incredibly beautiful East African holiday wilderness venue.

On the steeply forested Rift Valley escarpment, incredibly lovely Gombe waterfalls tumble hundreds of feet down lushly carpeted rock faces. The small park at 56 square kilometers (22 sq. m) is home to two other chimpanzee communities and many other primates and mammals, as well as over 200 and 250 species of birds and butterflies respectively. After a long, tough, road drive taking several days or a small aircraft flight of three to five hours from Dar-es-Salaam or Arusha, the park must finally be reached by boat, a distance of 10 miles (16 km) from Kigoma which can sometimes be a choppy aquatic journey lasting two hours by private speedboat or more on water taxis. Ujiji close to Kigoma was the place where Stanley met Dr. Livingstone and is said to have uttered his historical greeting. Explorers Richard Burton and John Speke have also set their foot there. The area was also notorious as a 19th-century route for ivory and slave traders. It takes a great deal of money and effort to make a Tanzania chimpanzee safari, but it is something you will never forget or regret. As Jane Goodall explained in her research, books and endless talks including TED, the time she spent with the chimps (mankind’s nearest cousin, sharing 98% of our genetic coding), enriched both her personal life and her understanding of our own behavior and our place in our speck of natural world amidst a wider boundless universe.

Although best known as a superb place for an exploratory African primate safari, Gombe Stream National Park is a photographer’s delight for its birds and butterflies, its magnificent scenery and its quintessentially unspoiled beaches. You can spend many hours simply absorbing its tranquil ambience from a beach hammock or a traditional dhow on the cobalt clears inland sea. You can fish with a rod, snorkel amongst scintillating shoals of cichlids: larger versions of the living neon jewels familiar from childhood aquaria. You can walk to awe-inspiring falls of lacy spume cascading hundreds of feet through rainforest from Rift Valley escarpments, or you can visit the Gombe Stream Research Base (prior arrangement required), local villages, community projects and places of historical interest. Chimpanzee communities co-operate in hunting, keeping watch, recognizing danger or food and communicating their feelings to others. They can also transmit more personal information to significant individuals by means of barks, whimpers, howls, screeches and a repertoire of 15 distinct sounds, from warnings of specific threats, such as snakes, to queries, challenges and expressions of enjoyment and frustrations. After a two-hour trek or more to find the chimps, choruses of breathy hoots from the forest canopy announce that you have been spotted. You may watch for no more than an hour as the community you have found performs its daily rituals of mutual grooming, aggression, fondling, deference, feeding and boisterous play.

The chimps are vulnerable to human influence. They are curious enough to handle anything left lying around, and they are sufficiently like us to incubate our germs. Therefore, there are strict rules for human and chimp viewing interactions. Parties of no more than six BookmySafary.com guests must not approach within ten meters of the primate community, and only if in good health prior to the start of the activity. Even so, you may be required to breathe through a mask that covers your nose and mouth. Only children over the age of 15 years are allowed on chimp treks and must be accompanied by an adult guardian. This may seem unduly restrictive, but the magic of Gombe will soon exert its influence and you will be moved by the emotions demonstrated by these “mock men” as they were christened by natives. Mothers nurse their babies. Siblings groom one another, tumbling and chasing round their elders, sometimes cuffed if they become too venturesome. Theirs is a strict social hierarchy evoked by their patterns of communication. For example, pant-hoots are only addressed to their betters, never their inferiors, and ritual submission is performed by females and beta males towards alpha males and senior matriarchs. No-one comes to intimately tour Gombe without a fascination for its most famous denizens, the equivocal chimps which at once endear and repel as we realize how like ourselves these primitive near cousins actually are.

Lake Tanganyika

Lake Tanganyika — is arguably the most beautiful Great Lake in Africa, formed in the Great African Rift Valley, with long, deserted beaches of silver sand backed by tropical forest on blue mountain ridges down which lacy waterfalls cascade hundreds of meters through lush ravines, home to many primates including Gombe and Mahale wild chimpanzees and a rich variety of mammals, birds and butterflies. It is the ultimate destination for an off-beat, alternate beach holiday in Africa. Lake Tanganyika is filled from the Ruzizi River, Kalambo River, and the Malagarasi River. The latter flowed directly into the Congo River millions of years ago before Lake Tanganyika was formed as part of the Great African Rift Valley. Steep escarpments surrounding the lake rise to almost 2000 meters, falling sharply into the lake to an equal depth, making it the deepest lake in Africa and also the second largest freshwater lake in the world, three quarters of which is filled with undisturbed anoxic silt below 500 meters of blue waters. Above the silt are found jellyfish, crabs and sardines which convinced scientists that the lake was once connected to the sea. But later it was proved that a parallel evolution had occurred during more than 10 million years since the lake was formed.

An authentic tour of Lake Tanganyika with BookmySafary.com offers an unrivaled opportunity to see evolution at work. Snorkeling in the shallow lagoons, you can get close to thousands of rainbow cichlid fish, in over 250 species, ranging from the size of your fingernail to the size of your arm. It is thought that as one multi-hued population got cut off from another by shifting sandbanks, each group evolved separate colorings as females chose the most splendid mates. They are now popular aquarium fish because of their beautiful markings, some even neon in their brilliance. Their mouths became multi-functional with double sets of jaws and teeth adapted for grazing and fighting. Some have developed amazing strategies to protect their young from predators, even carrying them in their mouths. Others became efficient parasites, mimicking the markings of their prey in order to get close enough to graze on their scales with specially adapted chisel-like teeth, without killing the donor. Lake fish forms 40% of the protein diet for a million people in the surrounding countries and is a major export to southern Africa. In deeper waters, there are vast stocks of sardines, regularly fished by traditional fleets of lantern-lit dugout canoes and some sailing dhows which make a delightful night time picture as their illuminated cloth sails are reflected in the crystalline water. This image is iconic of a dream tour of Lake Tanganyika.

Lake Tanganyika is a unique destination for an unusual safari to Tanzania. It is incredibly beautiful, has a rich and fascinating history, and is still in many ways unknown and mysterious. At 45 miles wide and 418 miles in length; the lake borders four countries: Tanzania, Burundi, Congo and Zambia, forming a vital link between them. Lake cruises by dhow for romantic water-borne meals, for fishing, snorkeling or deep lake swimming, can be organized from your Tanzanian safari lake base via your BookmySafary.com tour planner. Motorboat trips to neighboring villages and places of historic interest are also possible as are kayak and canoeing activities. The lake is not always calm, but can be quite choppy and exciting, especially on longer journeys, and there is always a lot to see on the way. The spectacular wildlife of the lake includes jellyfish, terrapins and over 400 species of fish, a rich harvest for lakeside predators which include otters, fish eagles, cormorants, pelicans, kingfishers, crocodiles and even snakes. A walk along the lake shore is a fantasy journey in itself. Although there are no tides, this vast inland sea is subject to rapid evaporation, wind movement and changing currents. You would believe you were on the seashore, judging by the beautiful mollusk shells on the sand. Sun-bleached driftwood sculptures are not rare. Sometimes, especially early in the morning, you will see pugmarks and other tracks in the sand where warthogs, antelopes, and even leopard and chimpanzees come down to the fresh water to drink. Small, tufted islands of reeds emerge from the shallows. Tumbled rocks form breakwaters and luxuriant foliage fronts deep undergrowth, before the eye is led to forested slopes. Across the lake, steep mountains rise sheerly to the sky.

During your tour of the lake, you will be told of many unsolved mysteries about the lake, which has indeed had a notoriously unstable geological career. Due to its high altitude and great depth, its location in a mountainous volcanic area, its high rate of evaporation, the unreliability of water flow from the rivers that supplied it and the climate changes it has survived, it has changed its character many times throughout the ages. Sometimes linked with other Great Lakes in the Rift Valley area and sometimes cut off from them; sometimes having a riverine outlet to the sea and at other times being completely landlocked, it depended on lava blockages diverting the inflow from the Nile less than 12000 years ago to allow it to build up from a level 300 meters below the present shoreline, spilling out through the Congo towards the sea. This outlet is still intermittent. When the British explorers Richard Burton and John Speke found it in 1858, they were actually searching for the source of the River Nile. Because of all these changes in currents and flow, the lifeless fossil silt has stayed in the lake for over 12,000 years and the water change rate is estimated at 6000 years. No wonder there are legends of Nessie type monsters in the lake, such as Gustave – the giant crocodile, Pamba, the lake monster, or Chipekwe, otherwise Emela ntouka, the “killer of elephants”. Recent research has been aimed at establishing a lake basin management authority to protect the lake and its contents, since it is a world treasure, a magical place where magnificent creatures, many still unknown to science, may be encountered by anyone on safari in this expanse of Africa.