Welcome to one of Africa's most underrated parks. Thanks to its proximity to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro, Tarangire National Park usually assigned only a day visit as part of a larger northern circuit safari. We think it deserves a whole lot more, at least in the dry season. It's a place where elephants dot the plains like cattle, where lion roars and zebra barks fill the night, all set against a backdrop of constantly changing scenery.
Partly we love Tarangire for its wildlife and in this sense its statistics speak for themselves. Tarangire has the second-highest (after Serengeti) concentration of wildlife of any Tanzanian national park and reportedly the largest concentration of elephants in the world. The Tarangire ecosystem, with the park as its heart and soul, also has more than 700 resident lions and sightings are common. Less visible, but nonetheless present are leopards and cheetahs. What sustains them are large herds of zebras, wildebeest, hartebeest, elands, oryx, waterbucks, lesser kudus, giraffes and buffaloes. With more than 450 species, including many rare ones, some say that Tarangire is the best birdwatching destination in Tanzania.
But this is one place where the wildlife tells only half the story. Dominating the park's 2850 sq km are some of Northern Tanzania's most varied landscapes. The great stands of epic baobabs should be reason enough to come here, but there are also sun-blistered termite mounds in abundance, as well as grassy savannah plains and vast swamps. And cleaving the park in two is the Tarangire River, its meandering course and (in some places) steep riverbanks providing a dry-season lure for so many stirring wildlife encounters.
Come the short rainy season, and the park changes completely, as its wild inhabitants disperse out across the Maasai Steppe, over an area 10 times larger than the park. For this, too, is a Tarangire specialty: one of the park's greatest rewards is the chance to discern and tune into the seasonal rhythms of wild Africa.
