Western Circuit
Lying in the Great Rift Valley are the inland lakes, Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika. All three national parks in this circuit offer the only safe opportunities to see chimpanzees in the wild today. The habitats of these areas are a merger between Western Africa and East Africa; therefore the cultures, rainfall and flora are unique to this small area of Africa. The Western circuit is seldom experienced on its own but rather as an addition to either the southern or northern circuits or both. The western circuit is so remote that transport by both aircraft and then boat is the only means of getting there.
Gombe Stream National Park
Gombe stream
Gombe is the smallest of Tanzania’s national parks: a fragile strip of chimpanzee habitat straddling the steep slopes and river valleys that hem in the sandy northern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Its chimpanzees – habituated to human visitors – were made famous by the pioneering work of Jane Goodall, who in 1960 founded a behavioral research program that now stands as the longest-running study of its kind in the world. The matriarch Fifi, the last surviving member of the original community was only three-years old when Goodall first set foot in Gombe and is still regularly seen by visitors
Chimpanzees share about 98% of their genes with humans and no scientific expertise is required to distinguish between the individual repertoires of pants, hoots and screams that define the celebrities, the powerbrokers, and the supporting characters. Perhaps you will see a flicker of understanding when you look into a chimp’s eyes, assessing you in return – a look of apparent recognition across the narrowest of species barriers.
The most visible of Gombe’s other mammals are also primates. A troop of beachcomber olive baboons, under study since the 1960s, is exceptionally habituated, while red-tailed and red colobus monkeys – the latter regularly hunted by chimps – stick to the forest canopy.
The park’s 200-odd bird species range from the iconic fish eagle to the jewel-like Peter’s twin spots that hop tamely around the visitors’ centre.
After dusk, a dazzling night sky is complemented by the lanterns of hundreds of small wooden boats, bobbing on the lake like a sprawling city
Mahale Mountains National Park
Mahale
Mahale Mountains is home to some of Africa’s last remaining wild chimpanzees: a population of roughly 800 (only 60 individuals forming what is known as “M group”), habituated to human visitors by a Japanese research project founded in the 1960s. Tracking the chimps of Mahale is a magical experience. The guide’s eyes pick out last night’s nests – shadowy clumps high in a gallery of trees crowding the sky. Scraps of half-eaten fruit and fresh dung become valuable clues, leading deeper into the forest. Butterflies flit in the dappled sunlight.
Then suddenly you are in their midst: preening each other’s glossy coats in concentrated huddles, squabbling noisily, or bounding into the trees to swing effortlessly between the vines.
The area is also known as Nkungwe, after the park’s largest mountain which is held sacred by the local Tongwe people. At 2,460 meters (8,069 ft) this mountain is the highest of the six prominent points that make up the Mahale Range.
And while chimpanzees are the star attraction, the slopes support a diverse forest fauna, including readily observed troops of red colobus, red-tailed and blue monkeys, and a kaleidoscopic array of colorful forest birds.
You can trace the Tongwe people’s ancient pilgrimage to the mountain spirits, hiking through the mountain rainforest belt – home to an endemic race of Angola colobus monkey – to high grassy ridges chequered with alpine bamboo. Bathe in the impossibly clear waters of the world’s longest, second-deepest and least-polluted freshwater lake – harboring an estimated 1,000 fish species – before returning as you came, by boat.
Katavi National Park
Katavi
Isolated, untrammeled and seldom visited, Katavi is a true wilderness, providing the few intrepid souls who make it there with a thrilling taste of Africa as it must have been a century ago.
Tanzania’s third largest national park, it lies in the remote southwest of the country, within a truncated arm of the Rift Valley that terminates in the shallow, brooding expanse of Lake Rukwa.
The bulk of Katavi supports a hypnotically featureless cover of tangled brachystegia woodland, home to substantial but elusive populations of the localized eland, sable and roan antelopes. But the main focus for game viewing within the park is the Katuma River and associated floodplains such as the seasonal Lakes Katavi and Chada. During the rainy season, these lush, marshy lakes are a haven for myriad water birds. Seasons define much of the park’s ecohydrology: while Lake Chada and Lake Katavi are grasslands during the dry season, they transform into shallow lakes with the onset of heavy rains during the rainy season (October to April). The average rainfall is approximately 930 mm and follows a bimodal pattern with short rains in slight low in February. The vital lifeline of the Park is the Katuma river which feeds Lake Katavi in the north and Lake Chada in the center as well as the huge Katisunga floodplain (425 km²). In recent years, this river as well as the Kapapa and Ngolima rivers, which feed lake Chada, tend to dry out earlier due to illegal damming upstream outside the national park.