Mahale Mountains National Park
Mahale Mountains National Park is an idyllic lost world; few other people ever see the magical forest, mountain waterfalls, and the gin-clear lake.
A chimpanzee paradise, where fantasy mountains and forests rise out of Lake Tanganyika.
The final hour of your journey to this far flung Garden of Eden is by boat on a cobalt blue lake, stretching 500 miles north to south and a mile below. As the fishing villages thin out and mountains rise, you begin to sense how much you've left behind. Time slows down in the silence of no roads for a hundred miles. The beauty is irrepressible. We’ve seen hunting dog on these beaches, bushbuck, even the pennant-winged night-jar.
Life here is a hedonistic wilderness cocktail. In the forest, as well as a completely wild-living, but habituated group of chimpanzees, live nine other species of primate, leopards and a host of shy forest creatures. Around them, streams are strung with vines, ripening fruit and jasmine flowers. By the beaches, with tropical fish around them like butterflies, hippopotami bob in its clear waters.
Greystoke
Chada
Expeditionary walking camp
Discover our Mahale camps
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Greystoke Mahale, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, has been around for many years. In the far and not much-explored west of Tanzania, it’s the best place in the country (probably in all Africa, actually, outside of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to observe chimpanzees in their natural habitats.
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The Mahale Mountains in western Tanzania are famous for their chimps: there are some 800 of them here, around 75 of them habituated. Guests at this spectacular beach lodge on Lake Tanganyika are likely to spot other primate species, too, including red colobus, red-tailed monkeys and vervets.
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You might say the 20-year-old Nomad Tanzania knows this corner of the world more intimately than most—which might explain how their next venture is the first to secure a previously untapped viewpoint. Six canvas bungalows, lined up along the Ngorongoro Crater Rim, feature unprecedented vistas of both the crater floor sunrises and Serengeti sunsets.
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Low-impact Entamanu is set slightly apart, but close enough to have astonishing views into the crater bowl and the Serengeti behind (the name means “circle” in the Masai language).