Mahale Mountains National Park

Overview

Mahale is the most remote and, for many people, the most beautiful park in Tanzania: a range of forested peaks rising to 2,462 metres on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, with no roads inside it at all. You arrive by light aircraft and then by boat, and you move around on foot. The reason to make the journey is the chimpanzees. The Mahale mountains hold around a thousand of them, and the M group has been studied continuously by Japanese researchers since 1965, which means they are thoroughly habituated - an hour spent sitting a few metres from a chimpanzee family here is one of the great wildlife experiences anywhere. Trekking is a real hike, often two to four hours of steep, humid forest. Between treks there is the lake itself: some of the clearest freshwater in the world, home to hundreds of endemic cichlid species, and swimming, snorkelling and kayaking straight off a white sand beach with the forest behind you.