Tarangire National Park

Size: 2600 sq km (about 1600 sq miles)

Location: 118 kms (about 75 miles) southwest of Arusha

Getting here: Easy drive from Arusha or Lake Manyara; can continue on to Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. Charter flights from Arusha and the Serengeti.

To do: Guided walking safaris; day trip to the Barabaig tribes ancient Kolo rock paintings.

Best time: Year round but dry season (June-September) for sheer number of animals

Accommodation: One lodge, 1 tented lodge, 1 luxury tented camp inside the park, 2 outside. Camp sites in and around the park.

Map

Day after day of cloudless skies. The fierce sun sucks the moisture from the landscape, baking the earth a dusty red, the withered grass as brittle as straw. The Tarangire River has shriveled to a shadow of its wet season self. But it is choked with wildlife. Thirsty nomads have wandered hundreds of parched kilometers knowing that here, there is always water. Herds of up to 300 elephants scratch the parched river bed for underground streams while migratory wildebeest, zebra, buffalo, gazelle, hartebeest, eland and oryx crowd the shrinking lagoons. It's a smorgasobord for predators - the greatest concentration of wildlife outside the Serengeti ecosystem.

The rains scatter the seasonal visitors over a 20,000 square kilometer (about 12,500 sq mile) range until they exhaust the green plains and the river calls once more. But Tarangire' s mobs of elephant are easily encountered, wet or dry. The swamps, tinged green year round, are the focus of 550 bird varieties, the most breeding species in one habitat anywhere in the world. On drier ground you find Kori bustards, the heaviest flying bird; the stocking thighed ostrich, the world's largest bird; and ground hornbill that bluster like turkeys. Tarangire's pythons climb trees, as do its lions and leopards, lounging in the branches where the fruit of the sausage tree disguises the twitch of a tail.