Size

2600 sq km (about 1600 sq miles)

Location

118 kms (about 75 miles) southwest of Arusha

Getting there

Easy drive from Arusha or Lake Manyara; can continue on to Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Charter flights from Arusha and the Serengeti.

To Do

Guided walking safaris; day trip to the Barabaig tribe’s ancient Kolo rock.

Best Time

Year around except dry season (June – September) for sheer numbers of animals.

Day after day of cloudless skies. The fierce sun sucks the moisture from the landscape, baking the earth a dusty red, the withered grass as brittle as straw. The Tarangire river has shriveled to a shadow of its wet season self. But it is chocked with wildlife. Thirsty nomads have wandered hundreds of parched kilometers knowing that here there, is always water. 

Herds of up to 300 elephants scratch the parched riverbed for underground streams while migratory wildebeest, zebra, buffalo gazelle, hart bees, eland and Oryx crowd the shrinking lagoons. It a smorgasbord for predators the greatest concentration of wildlife outside the Serengeti ecosystem.

The rains scatter the seasonal visitors over a 20,000 square kilometer (about 12,500 sq miles) range until they exhaust the green plains and the river calls once more. But Tarangire mobs of elephant are easily encountered, wet or dry. The swamps, tinged green year round, are the focus for 50 bird varieties, the most breeding species in one habitat anywhere in the world. On drier ground you find Koori bustard, the heaviest flying bird; the stocking sighed ostrich, the world largest bird; and ground hornbills that bluster like turkeys. Tarangire pythons climb trees, as do this lions and leopards, lounging in the branches where the fruit of the sausage tree disguises the twitch of a tail.