Tarangire National Park

Tarangire is built around a single river that keeps flowing through the dry season, when almost nothing else in the region does. From about June, the animals for miles around have nowhere else to drink, so the park fills right up. Elephant herds here run into the hundreds!

It's also the baobab park. These are African baobabs, squat and swollen and often hollowed out by elephants, and they give Tarangire a look you won't find anywhere else on the circuit.

Tarangire is the elephant park. In the dry season, the number of elephants along the river is the highest in northern Tanzania, and herds of two or three hundred aren't unusual in September. That alone makes the detour worth it!

But what really makes it worth more than the single night most itineraries give it? The landscape is completely different from everywhere else on the circuit. The Serengeti is grassland and the crater is a bowl. Tarangire is rolling country dotted with baobabs: squat, grey and enormous, some of them well over a thousand years old. It photographs like nowhere else in the country, and coming here after three days of open plains changes the whole feel of a trip.

For most of the year, it's also quiet. It's only an hour and a half from Arusha, right at the start of every northern circuit, and most visitors treat it as a quick stop instead of a destination. In the dry months we often push for two nights, because the second morning here is usually better than the first, and hardly anyone stays for it.

Elephant, above all. In the dry season, the Tarangire River is the only permanent water for a very long way, so the elephants come to it. When the surface water dries up, they dig for water in the sandy riverbed, and other animals then drink from those holes. It's one of the easiest places to watch an animal literally engineer its landscape.

Lion. Common, and Tarangire has a local reputation for tree-climbing lions, which is unusual and not fully explained. It's not guaranteed, but it's definitely worth asking your guide about.

Buffalo, zebra, wildebeest and eland in good numbers in the dry months, all drawn in by the same water.

Fringe-eared oryx and lesser kudu live here, and they're hard to find anywhere else on the northern circuit. So is the gerenuk, down in the far south. These are the animals that get someone on their third safari really excited about Tarangire.

Leopard and cheetah are both around. Look for leopards in the riverside woodland, and cheetahs on the more open ground in the south.

Birds. Over five hundred species, and Tarangire is one of the best birding parks in the country. The yellow-collared lovebird and ashy starling are near-endemics here. And in the wet season, the swamps in the south fill up with enormous numbers of birds.

Pythons in the trees are a Tarangire speciality. Your guide will point them out, and trust us, you'd never spot them on your own.

The park follows the Tarangire River for roughly 2,850 square kilometres of rolling savanna, ridges and seasonal swamp. Two things define it: the river, and the baobabs.

The baobabs are Adansonia digitata, the African species. They're squat, thick-trunked and gnarled, nothing like the tall, straight Madagascan trees you see in most photos labelled “baobab”. In the dry season, elephants strip and chew the bark for the moisture inside, which is why so many trunks here are scarred at exactly elephant height.

The Silale swamp in the south is the other side of the park. In the wet season it's properly wet and mostly impassable. In the dry season it turns into green grazing while everything around it is brown, and the animals follow.

The park is part of a much bigger ecosystem that stretches south and east into community land, and there's a real migration in and out of it. Animals spread out in the wet season and come back to the river as things dry up. If you want to know when to visit, that movement is the single most important thing to understand.

Let's clear this up first: Tarangire has nothing to do with the Serengeti wildebeest migration. Anyone who suggests otherwise is mixing up two different things.

It does have a migration of its own, though, and that's why the park is so seasonal. In the wet season, from roughly November to May, there's water everywhere and the animals spread out of the park across the wider ecosystem, towards the Simanjiro plains and the Maasai steppe. The park is beautiful then: green, full of birds and almost empty of vehicles. The big concentrations just aren't there.

As the land dries out from about June, the animals return to the only permanent water. By August and September, the numbers along the river are extraordinary. That's why every experienced planner puts Tarangire in a dry-season itinerary, and treats it as optional in a green-season one.

Game drives along the river in the dry months, which is where the park really delivers. The loops in the north are the busiest. The further south you go towards Silale, the fewer vehicles you'll see.

Walking safaris are allowed in parts of Tarangire, which isn't true of most of the northern circuit. On foot, the baobabs stop being scenery and become seriously impressive. You also start noticing a whole different world: dung beetles, tracks, even the smell of an elephant that's just walked off.

Night drives are possible from some concessions on the park boundary. They open up a nocturnal cast of genets, civets, bushbabies and porcupines you'll never see in daylight.

Ballooning runs here as well as in the Serengeti, and floating over baobab country is arguably more interesting than over open plains.

Birding deserves its own mention. Is anyone in your group a birder? Tell us, and we'll plan the day differently. Tarangire rewards slow driving and lots of stopping.

By road from Arusha, it's roughly two hours on good tarmac. That makes Tarangire the easiest park on the circuit to reach, and the natural first stop on an itinerary heading west. It's even close enough to do as a full day trip from Arusha, if that's all the time you've got.

By air, Kuro airstrip inside the park takes light aircraft from Arusha and connects on to the Serengeti. It's worth thinking about if you'd like to skip the drive to the crater.

Park fees are per person, per twenty-four hours, and set by TANAPA. Tarangire is cheaper to enter than Ngorongoro, which is partly why a second night here is often better value than a second night on the crater rim.

Putting it together. Tarangire, Lake Manyara, Ngorongoro and the Serengeti sit on one westward line, and that's why the northern circuit works as a circuit. Visit them in that order and you'll never have to backtrack.