Mahale Mountains National Park

Mahale is the great fly-in wilderness of western Tanzania, a 1,613 square kilometre park protecting the Mahale Mountains where they plunge into Lake Tanganyika. The forested slopes rise to Mount Nkungwe at 2,462 metres, and the park holds one of the last two protected chimpanzee populations in Tanzania, together with Gombe. The chimp population here is the largest known anywhere, estimated at around 1,000 individuals across ten communities, of which the M-group of some sixty animals is fully habituated for researchers and small numbers of visitors.

Access is by air only. Guests fly on a scheduled or charter flight from Arusha to the Mahale airstrip, then transfer by boat one hour south along the shore to their lodge. There are no roads to the lodges, no vehicles inside the park, and no villages within the boundary. This isolation is the point. From a Mahale beach the only sounds are the water, the forest and, at dawn, the distant pant hoots of chimps waking above you.

Chimp tracking here is unlike Gombe. The forest is bigger, the mountains are higher, and the animals range further. A morning trek can last one hour or four, with a steady climb through primary rainforest. Once found, guests spend an hour with the M-group observing behaviour that is entirely wild, feeding on fruit and figs, grooming, playing and occasionally hunting red colobus. The forest itself is a spectacle, tall Ficus and Julbernardia canopy, buttress roots, orchids on the branches, and constant primate movement in the understory.

Around the tracking, Mahale is one of the most beautiful beach destinations in Africa. Kangwena and Nomad beaches at Greystoke camp are white sand fringed by forest and clear turquoise water. Snorkelling reveals hundreds of endemic cichlids, kayaking along the shore at sunrise is exceptional, and traditional dhow sundowners are a nightly ritual. This is a place to combine three or four nights with a fly-in Katavi extension for the ultimate western circuit.