Mahale Mountains National Park
Size
About 1,600 square kilometres (618 square miles), on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika
What Mahale Mountains is known for
Wild chimpanzees, mountain rainforest and a lake with clear water
Mahale Mountains from Arusha, Ruaha or Dar es Salaam
By air only, followed by a boat transfer along the shore
Best time to visit Mahale Mountains
August to October, when the chimpanzees sit lower in the mountains
We recommend
Three or four nights
You land on a grass strip, step into a boat, and travel along a shore where mountains rise straight out of the water. White beach, water so clear that you see the bottom, and behind it steep slopes with dense rainforest. This landscape exists nowhere else in Tanzania.
Lake Tanganyika is the second deepest lake in the world, and it lies there quietly. At the end of the afternoon guests often simply sit on the beach watching fishing boats in the distance, with the mountains behind them. That is the setting of every day here.
And in the morning you walk into those mountains. In the forest above the camps lives the M group, a community of about sixty chimpanzees that researchers from Kyoto University have followed since the sixties. After Gombe that is the longest running study of wild chimpanzees in the world, and it is those decades of habituation that let you see them from so close.
What you then experience is hard to sum up. You hear them first, a burst of calling somewhere in the forest above you. You climb up to it, and then a group of chimpanzees sits around you, grooming each other, squabbling, with young hanging from branches. One hour is all you get, and that hour is what the whole trip turns on.
There are no roads in the park and no vehicles. You get there by plane and boat, and you move on foot or over the water. So there are no game drives, no night drives and no Big Five. Anyone who wants to see elephant herds and lions on a plain needs to be in the Serengeti or Ruaha.
Mahale is an addition to a safari, not a replacement for it. And it asks something of you, because the chimpanzees are in the mountains and you have to climb to them.
The park holds an estimated eight hundred to a thousand chimpanzees. The group visitors see is the M group, about sixty animals, used to people through sixty years of research. They are never guaranteed. They are wild animals that move freely through the mountains, and a trek can fail. With two or three trekking days the chance is good, with one day it is a gamble. That is the main reason you stay several nights here.
In practice you visit a narrow strip of a large park. The camps lie on the western shore, around Kansyana and Kasiha, where the research station and the landing points are too. Each camp has its own beach and jetty, and just about everything you do starts there, whether you head into the mountains or out onto the water. Above those camps lies the rainforest where the M group lives. That is the trekking area, and how far you have to climb depends on where the chimpanzees are that day. Higher up the range lies the Nkungwe peak, at nearly 2,500 metres (8,200 feet). You can climb it, but that is a multi-day trip with camping on the way, only for those who are fit and arrange it in advance. The rest of the park, by far the largest part, is miombo woodland and grassland on the eastern side. There are no facilities there and no visitors come.
Before you leave in the morning, the trackers are already in the forest. They follow the M group daily and know where the animals built their nests the evening before, so they start there and search on from that point. They work with sound and with tracks. A burst of calling in the distance, broken branches, freshly eaten fruit on the ground. When they find the group they pass it on, and then you walk to it. That system is the reason you have a chance here at all. The forest is steep and dense, the chimpanzees move fast, and without people following them every day you would almost never find them.
Your guide does something alongside that which matters just as much. He sets the pace on the climb, because the paths are steep and often slippery, and he makes sure you are calm and quiet when you reach the animals. That last part is not only etiquette, it decides how long the group stays put.
June and July
Three or four nights. The scheduled flight runs on Monday and Thursday, and that sets your stay. Arrive on Monday and leave on Thursday and that is three nights. The other way round it is four. That works out well, because you need those days. Chimpanzees are never guaranteed, and with two or three trekking days your chance is good. With one trekking day it is a gamble, and then you have travelled far and paid a lot for something that can fail. That is why Mahale does not work as a short stop.
Extra days give you more than just a second chance. They give time for the lake, for kayaking and snorkelling, for a forest walk to the waterfalls, and to recover after a hard climb. The lake is not the backdrop of the trip, it is the second reason to come.
Mahale lies in the far west and is reachable only by air, with a boat transfer along the shore to your camp. The flights run on Monday and Thursday, from the south out of Ruaha and from the north on a shared charter out of Arusha, which can pick up in the Serengeti on the way. Reckon on a full day of travelling. Both routes call at Katavi, and that is the most logical neighbour. First the plains and swamps, then the chimpanzees at the lake.
Mahale works best as the close of a larger trip. You usually do your safari in Tanzania first, and then fly west for the chimpanzees and a few days at the lake. It is not a stop along the way, the flight days and the travel time are too restricting for that.
In the whole park there are only two camps that come into consideration for our travellers, together good for about sixteen tents. Both lie on the beach, with their own jetty and with the forest directly behind them. One is a small tented camp, with a handful of tents of wood and canvas, built with timber from old dhows. The other lies a little further along the same shore, with tents on raised platforms under thatched roofs. From both you trek to the same habituated group of chimpanzees, so the difference is not in what you see. Everything has to be brought in by boat or plane, there is no road, and there are only sixteen tents in a park of sixteen hundred square kilometres. Reckon on one of the most expensive stays in Tanzania.
The classic tour through the north, from Lake Manyara, the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti, with Zanzibar to finish. The charter to Mahale slips in logically between.
Nine days following the migration through the Serengeti, with Tarangire and the Ngorongoro Crater on the way. The charter then takes you west, to the chimpanzees in the mountain forest.
Fifteen days through Nyerere, Mikumi and Ruaha, far from the crowds. This is the smoothest connection of the three, because the scheduled flight that goes via Katavi to Mahale leaves from Ruaha.