The place
Tarangire is built around a single river that keeps running when everything around it has dried out. From June the surrounding Maasai steppe empties toward it, and the park fills with game — most famously elephant, in breeding herds that regularly run past a hundred animals and occasionally several times that.
The other signature here is botanical. Baobabs stand across the hills in numbers you will not see elsewhere on the circuit, many of them centuries old, scarred where elephants have worked at the fibrous bark for moisture. Birders come for a list of more than 550 recorded species — the richest of any Tanzanian park — and for dry-country specials such as fringe-eared oryx, gerenuk and lesser kudu that the wetter parks simply do not hold.
Why go
The quietest of the big northern parks, and the most reliable for elephant.
When to visit
Tarangire is a dry-season park, and unusually emphatic about it. Between June and October the river is the only water for miles and the concentrations along it are extraordinary. In the green months the game disperses across the steppe and the park can feel empty — though the birding peaks just as the mammals thin out.
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Ready when you are
Two hours from Arusha, and the natural first park of a Northern Circuit route before Ngorongoro and the Serengeti.
