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Most people visit the western circuit to track chimpanzees in Gombe or Mahale Mountains National Park. These two chimp reserves on the shore of Lake Tanganyika offer the best chimp tracking in Africa. Getting here is expensive and time-consuming and is mostly done by chartered plane from Arusha.
Instead of visiting one of the chimp reserves as an add-on to a safari in the north, you can combine it with a safari in Katavi, which is the savannah reserve in the western circuit and probably Tanzania's least visited park. Not for lack of wildlife, though. This park offers excellent game viewing in the dry season with superb wilderness appeal, which will make you'll feel like you own the place.
Gombe stream national park is located in western Kigoma Region of Tanzania and it is the smallest park in the country. It has 20 square miles of forest running along the hills of the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika – the terrain distinguished by by steep valleys and forest vegetation ranging from grassland to alpine bamboo to tropical rainforest. It is only accessible by boat and it is famous for its chimpanzee populations.
Other primates inhabiting the park are beachcombers, olive baboons, red-tailed monkeys and vervet monkeys. The park also boasts of about 200 species of birds, 11 species of snakes and the occasional leopards and hippos. Trekking to see the chimpanzee and swimming in the snorkel in Lake Tanganyika where there are almost 100 kinds of colorful cichlid fish is a common tourist activity.
Locals refer to the Kitulo Plateau as Bustani ya Mungu - The Garden of God – while botanists have dubbed it the Serengeti of Flowers, host to ‘one of the great floral spectacles of the world’. And Kitulo is indeed a rare botanical marvel, home to a full 350 species of vascular plants, including 45 varieties of terrestrial orchid, which erupt into a riotous wildflower display of breathtaking scale and diversity during the main rainy season of late November to April.
One of the most important watersheds for the Great Ruaha River, Kitulo is well known for its floral significance – not only a multitude of orchids, but also the stunning yellow-orange red-hot poker and a variety of aloes, proteas, geraniums, giant lobelias, lilies and aster daisies, of which more than 30 species are endemic to southern Tanzania. Big game is sparsely represented, though a few hardy mountain reedbuck and eland still roam the open grassland.
But Kitulo – a botanist and hiker’s paradise - is also highly alluring to birdwatchers. Tanzania’s only population of the rare Denham’s bustard is resident, alongside a breeding colony of the endangered blue swallow and such range-restricted species as mountain marsh widow, Njombe cisticola and Kipengere seedeater. Endemic species of butterfly, chameleon, lizard and frog further enhance the biological wealth of God’s Garden.
Mahale Mountains National Park lies on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in Kigoma Tegion of Tanzania. The park is well known as having the largest number of chimpanzee. It is also the only place that chimps and lions co-exist. Due to lack of infrastructure the only way to access the park is by use of boats through Lake Tanganyika.
One of the less visited park's in the land, although the third largest in Tanzania. Because of its remoteness Katavi is an untouched wilderness of floodplains and Miombo woodlands.It's got several seasonal lakes and the Katuma River which guarantees resident animals presence. If you want to see huge buffaloes, hippos and crocodiles, the largest herds are concentrated in this park.
The roan and sable antelopes are common residents of this place, as well as the Giraffes, Leopards, Zebras, Lions and the African Jumbo. Hundreds of resident and migration birds frequent Katavi lakes. More than 400 species have been identified and recorded so far.
