Safari Day At Tarangire National Park Tanzania
After multiple days spent at Serengeti Park, I still had one more safari day to go at Tarangire National Park which is one of the smaller parks closer to Arusha. Tarangire is what I would call ‘safari-light’ since it’s got a nice mix of animals in a much more compact space compared to the Serengeti. I saw many of the regular safari wildlife including wildebeest, zebras, giraffes, warthogs and others. I even saw a few lions who like to climb trees here.
Tarangire is also known for the abundance of elephants. Although elephants were commonly found in both Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti, there seemed to be significantly more of them here per square kilometre, ie., higher concentrations of them.
Of course I took enough video footage to produce a clip dedicated to the wildlife I saw at Tarangire which is below.
My Personal Opinion Of Tarangire National Park
My safari day at Tarangire was the final one on my itinerary as far as wildlife viewing so I’ll offer my personal opinion of this park when I compare it to Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater. It’s definitely a nice park for safari animals and some of the roads are actually not as bumpy as those at the other parks but as I already mentioned, it’s ‘safari-light’ in my view. In my opinion, both Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater offer better wildlife experiences plus landscape scenery but of course both are further away from Arusha and Kilimanjaro and therefore take more time commitment. Being closer to these main bases, Tarangire also felt more crowded than Serengeti and Ngorongoro whcih felt more spacious.
So I would say that if travellers are coming to Tanzania for mainly for Mount Kilimanjaro or a cultural tour or even a beach vacation over at Zanzibar and only have time for one day of safari, Tarangire would be a perfect day trip. In fact, this is why Tarangire is more crowded because of the combination of travellers on multiday safaris as well as those here as a day trip. You would get a nice one day fix of African safari with a day trip to Tarangire.
For those on multiday safaris, Tarangire Park was included on most itineraries from different tour operators when I was researching for the best safari to take. But if you are booking with a tour operator like Safari By Leo which can customize your itinerary, I would suggest skipping Tarangire altogether and replace it with an extra game drive day at Serengeti or even Ngorongoro Crater. Yes the watering pool at Tarangire where all the elephants, zebras and wildebeest came to drink and the tree climbing lions were interesting but I still feel that an extra day at Serengeti would result in even better wildlife encounters.
