Expert Reviews of Gombe National Park (5 Reviews)

Our most recent visit was in June, when chimpanzees often climb high onto the forested slopes rising above Lake Tanganyika. Sightings are less predictable at this time of year, so we were delighted to find a group of eight chimpanzees after less than an hour's hike. Reaching them involved forcing our rather awkward bodies through dense undergrowth in search of clear viewing angles, but the effort was well rewarded. The group consisted mainly of females with young babies. These are often the individuals that remain closer to the lakeshore while much of the core community moves higher into the forest at this time of year.

As always, we were allowed to spend an hour with the chimpanzees. Our guides were generous with the timing, only starting the clock once we had unobstructed views after relocating the animals. The females spent their time grooming one another while the youngsters tumbled, climbed and played nearby.

Their grooming behaviour is a fascinating

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example of animal culture. In Mahale Mountains National Park, the other major chimpanzee-tracking destination on Lake Tanganyika, chimpanzees commonly perform the Grooming Handclasp, in which grooming partners clasp each other's hands overhead. In Gombe, however, grooming partners typically hold onto nearby branches instead, illustrating how neighbouring chimpanzee communities can develop distinct cultural traditions.

There are no roads in Gombe and access is exclusively by boat. The journey from Kigoma takes about 1½ hours. During our two-night stay we tracked chimpanzees on the afternoon of our arrival and again the following morning. We could have trekked again before returning to Kigoma on our final day, but chose to head off straight after breakfast due to time constraints.

Other worthwhile activities include a short hike to a picturesque waterfall and a visit to Jane Goodall's former research station.

Beyond the chimpanzees, we saw plenty of red colobus monkeys and olive baboons. The baboons have also been the subject of long-term research and are exceptionally habituated, making them endlessly entertaining to watch while relaxing around camp.

Afternoons were spent swimming in the crystal-clear waters of Lake Tanganyika, with jungle-clad mountains rising steeply behind the white-sand beach—a wonderfully relaxing way to end each day after time spent in the forest.

Tanzania’s smallest national park, set on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, is most famous for the pioneering chimpanzee research project that was initiated there by Jane Goodall in 1960, and now stands as the world’s longest-running study of an individual wild animal population. The main reason you’d visit is to track chimps, which is an utterly marvellous experience, even if most of the celebrity chimps featured in Goodall’s books and films are now long dead. In my experience, very few places anywhere in Africa offer comparably good chimp tracking, and while Mahale Mountains National Park, further south on Lake Tanganyika, has more of a wilderness atmosphere and more varied wildlife, Gombe has the advantage of greater accessibility on a budget (you can actually get there using daily passenger boats from nearby Kigoma, the main port and transport hub in this part of Tanzania). Other wildlife includes a beachcomber baboon troop that has also been studied for decades, three species

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of monkey – red-tailed, blue and red colobus, the latter frequently hunted by chimps – and a checklist of 287 bird species including fish eagle, palm-nut vulture and Peter’s twinspot, all of which frequent the camp.