Expert Reviews of Gombe National Park (5 Reviews)

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.

Gombe National Park, known for the pioneering research project of Jane Goodall in the 1960s, is, unsurprisingly, one of the best places in Africa to track chimpanzees. Despite Gombe’s small size, sightings aren’t guaranteed. But their distinctive pant-hooting calls helped us locate them four days in a row. Each time we got to spend a precious hour with these charismatic primates and each time was totally different. The first day we found them feeding on fruits high up in the canopy. The second day they challenged us as we followed them marching through dense undergrowth. We got great images the third day as we spent an hour watching them grooming and interacting on the forest floor. The fourth and last day was most exciting as we witnessed them on a manic colobus monkey hunt. Afternoons were spent swimming in the crystal-clear waters of Lake Tanganyika with jungle-clad mountains rising up from the white-sandy beach. On the fifth day, around sunrise, we joined a local passenger boat

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back to Kigoma, the gateway town for Gombe. Imagine our delight as we saw the chimps casually walking from the forest onto the beach as out boat pulled away.