Tarangire National Park

If you have to pick one park for elephants in Tanzania, choose Tarangire. During the dry season (June to October), the park hosts up to 3,000 elephants, drawn to the permanent water of the Tarangire River. Family groups of twenty or thirty are common, and it’s not unusual to see fifty or more elephants in a single afternoon. The scale is genuinely astonishing - at certain times of year, you can barely look in any direction without seeing grey.

Tarangire’s other signature is the baobab. The park is dotted with ancient, swollen-trunked baobabs, some estimated to be over a thousand years old. They are not just beautiful - they are also where leopards rest, where bees nest, and where the park’s famous tree-climbing pythons (a behaviour unique to this part of Africa) coil up in the branches. The combination of giant elephants under giant trees is one of the most photographed scenes in East Africa, and for good reason.

The park is also one of the best places in Tanzania for night game drives, which are not permitted in most other national parks. After dark, you can spot bushbabies, genets, civets, aardvark, and porcupine - species you would never see on a daytime drive. Combined with regular sightings of leopard, lion, and the rare greater kudu, a night drive is well worth the extra cost.

Tarangire works brilliantly as the first stop on a Northern Circuit safari - it’s only two hours from Arusha, so you can be in the park by mid-morning. Most visitors stay one or two nights before moving on to the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater. For birdwatchers, the park’s 550+ species make it one of the most important birding destinations in East Africa.