WESTERN CIRCUIT – TANZANIA
Destination
OVERVIEW
The Western Circuit is an exclusive circuit that offers plenty of attractions. The Circuit stands as the best destination for spotting primates. Let Ratel Adventures endorse you with an impressive view of Chimpanzee families. Not only primates, but the Western Circuit National Parks also offers a great chance for wildlife viewing in its various National Parks and Game Reserves.
Mahare National Park
Located in the remote western part of Tanzania, Mahale Mountains National Park is one of the most picturesque places in Tanzania. The park borders Lake Tanganyika, one of the oldest and deepest lakes in the world.
Getting to the park is an adventure as it is accessible only by air and boat. There are no roads in the park, only forest paths through the lush vegetation.
This park is a hiker’s paradise, but most importantly it is a chimpanzee paradise. Mahale is a haven for primates, with chimpanzee trekking one of the prime reasons for visits.The park is teeming with life, rivers and waterfalls are everywhere and around the shoreline of the lake, are the most unspoilt white sandy beaches anyone could imagine.
Katavi National Park
Katavi is like travelling back in time, maybe to the Pleistocene era. Animals seem bigger and more bestial. As a human, for once, you don’t feel like you own the planet. It’s a thrilling experience. Survival here depends on fragile seasonal rivers, the Katuma, the Kavu and the Kapapa.
Between the rivers, huge herds of buffalo and other herbivores concentrate for the rich grass of four great floodplains, including (our own backyard) Chada. As months wear on, the grass dries gold and withers.
By the end of the dry season, it’s all going a bit mad. As water becomes limited, so animals are drawn to the riverbanks. Hippopotamus in their thousands cram dwindling pools, crocodiles dig riverbank caves. Buffalo and elephant compete for waterholes. Lion, hyenas and other predators know this and wildlife watching here becomes even more outstanding.
Ruaha’s wild and untrammeled feel is what sets it apart from other reserves, making it a popular choice for regular east African safari. Ruaha is well known for its varied dramatic scenery, which includes rolling hills; large open plains; groves of skeletal baobabs and along its southern border, the Great Ruaha River, from which the park gets its name. This is by far the most dominant geographical feature of the national park and, for the wildlife it is the most important.
Ruaha has a hot, dry climate which means the animals don’t tend to stray too far from dependable water sources. This makes predicting game movements far easier, particularly in the dry season.
Gombe National Park
The smallest of Tanzania’s national parks, Gombe Stream National Park is a narrow strip of chimpanzee habitat on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, located on the far western border of Tanzania and the Congo.
The park is world-famous for Jane Goodall, the resident primatologist who spent many years in its forests studying the behavior of the endangered chimpanzees, contributing to the drive to combine the preservation of primate wildlife habitats with the development of eco-tourism and the beneficial involvement of indigenous human communities in Tanzania. The park is rich in both human and natural history.
The village of Ujiji is where historians think British researcher H.M. Stanley said the famous words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” in 1871 when he encountered fellow adventurer David Livingstone, who had been thought to have died. Though he was seriously ill, Livingstone convinced Stanley to join him on a search to find the source of the Nile — a quest which took them through the Gombe Valley.
