A column of wildebeest raising dust as it descends a dry riverbank during the migration

Chapter one — Northern Tanzania

Tanzania, the whole book

Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Kilimanjaro. Not the whole story.

Volcanoes and a rift valley made this landscape. Rain crosses it twice a year, grass follows the rain, and something over a million animals follow the grass. Everything famous about northern Tanzania is a consequence of that.

Northern Tanzania, in perspective

Rift escarpment

Serengeti≈1,500 m
Ngorongororim ≈2,300 m
Lake Natron≈600 m
Tarangire≈1,100 m
Lake Manyara≈960 m
Mkomazi≈700 m
Kilimanjaro5,895 m

Seven places along the rift. Select a place to explore.

The shape of it

Everything hangs off one line

The rift's western wall is the line the region is organised around. Natron lies at its foot in the north, Manyara at its foot in the south, and the crater highlands stand behind it. West of the wall the land opens out and becomes the Serengeti. East of it, past Arusha, the ground rises once into Kilimanjaro and then falls away toward the coast at Mkomazi.

Six hundred metres at the Natron flats. Five thousand eight hundred and ninety-five at Uhuru Peak. Under two hundred kilometres between them.

A safari vehicle among a herd of buffalo on the open Serengeti plains, sunlight breaking through cloud

01Serengeti — a system, not a place

Rain, then grass, then everything following both

The Serengeti is not one place you visit but a system you intercept. Where the herds are in any given week decides where you sleep, and that is a decision made a fortnight out, not a year ahead.

December to March

Short-grass plains in the south-east. Calving country, and the flattest horizons in the park.

May to July

The move north-west through the corridor. Long columns, heavy dust, fewer vehicles.

July to September

The Mara River. Crossings are weather-driven; nobody can promise you a date.

Lions resting together on a granite outcrop in the shade of a tree

Wildebeest plunging down a dusty bank and swimming a brown river in a long line

A wildebeest leaping from a steep, dusty riverbank into the water as the herd follows behind

Two cheetahs watching the grassland from a termite mound

A family group of elephants bunched together in long grass, adults and calves among acacia

The Serengeti plain running flat to a single horizon line under an open sky

02Ngorongoro — geology first

A collapsed volcano, still standing

You do not arrive at Ngorongoro so much as look down into it. The caldera fell in on itself around two and a half million years ago and left a floor with its own weather, its own water and a resident population that mostly stays put.

Rim: ≈2,200–2,400 m
Floor: ≈1,700 m
Depth: ≈600 m
Floor area: ≈260 km²

Five Maasai giraffe crossing the green highland grass above the crater, a red track and herded cattle behind them — The highlands above the rim are grazing land, and have been for a long time. The crater is one part of a conservation area people still live and herd in.

Zebras at the edge of a crater-floor pool as birds lift off, the forested crater wall rising behind them

Wildebeest and zebra grazing among fever trees on the crater floor, the caldera wall behind them — The wall rises up to six hundred metres from the floor, and most of the animals below never leave.

A Maasai man with a spear walking the Ngorongoro crater rim, the caldera floor and far rim wall behind him under low cloud

A family of zebra with a foal crossing the green crater floor under heavy cloud, the rim on the horizon

Ngorongoro is not a national park. It is a conservation area, and the only protected landscape in Tanzania where grazing, settlement and wildlife are held on the same ground by law rather than separated from each other. What that arrangement should look like is argued over continuously, and by the people who live in it.

The cone of Ol Doinyo Lengai at dusk under pink-lit cloud, dry gold grass and dark ash flats in the foreground

03Natron — the caustic end of the rift

The coolest lava on earth

Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only volcano anywhere still erupting natrocarbonatite — a sodium-rich lava that leaves the vent at around half the temperature of ordinary basalt. It runs almost like water, reads black rather than orange in daylight, and turns chalk white within a day or two of stopping.

The lake below it is what that chemistry does to standing water. Ash and hot springs load it with sodium carbonate until it reaches a pH closer to ammonia than to seawater, and shallow water sitting on a black crust can climb past 40 °C. Almost nothing lives in it. That is exactly why East Africa's lesser flamingos nest there and nowhere else — the water that keeps everything else off the flats keeps their eggs safe.

Lake surface: ≈600 m
Ol Doinyo Lengai: ≈2,960 m
Water pH: up to ≈10.5
Lava at the vent: ≈510 °C

A massed flock of lesser flamingos standing in the shallows of Lake Natron, one bird in flight, an escarpment ridge behind

A single lesser flamingo wading mid-stride through rippled water

The Engare Sero waterfall falling into a rock gorge, the river running over boulders below

The waterfall is at Engare Sero, on the southern shore. Nearby, an ash flow set around a few hundred human footprints and held them. Dating puts them somewhere between six and nineteen thousand years old — the largest set of ancient footprints found anywhere in Africa, left by people crossing the same flats.

04Tarangire — vertical country

Baobabs, and a river that decides things

Where the Serengeti runs flat, Tarangire stands up: baobab trunks, termite mounds, elephants in the middle distance. Through the dry months the Tarangire River is the only reliable water for a long way, and the park fills up accordingly.

A lone giraffe standing on a path through open grassland beneath a wide cloudy sky

Elephants drinking at a waterhole beneath two great baobabs, zebra grazing in the dry grass beyond

A cheetah standing alert in long green grass beneath acacia trees

An elephant striding toward the camera through red dust and acacia scrub

An elephant and calf standing in golden grass beside a river and exposed sandbanks

05Manyara — the transition

From the rift wall to the lake

Escarpment on one side, groundwater forest at its foot, and below that a soda lake full of birds. Twenty minutes changes the vegetation entirely.

Manyara is narrow. The park is a strip caught between the rift wall and the water, and the whole sequence — rock, forest, floodplain, lake — happens across a few kilometres. It is the one place in the north where you can watch the geology change the vegetation in front of you, which is why it belongs between the crater and the plains rather than competing with either.

A young male lion lying along the branch of an acacia at Lake Manyara

Zebra grazing the floodplain in front of drowned trees and the groundwater forest, the rift wall in haze behind

A lioness resting on a fallen trunk in the groundwater forest while two cubs climb the branches towards her

Three Maasai giraffe on the grass at the edge of the Manyara woodland

Manyara’s lions climb. Nobody has settled why.

06Mkomazi — the empty quarter

A sandy riverbed winding through the woodland in Mkomazi National Park

Where Northern Tanzania runs out

Mkomazi is the argument against everything else on this page. Dry Nyika thornbush, no crowd, no busy safari route, running east until it becomes Tsavo on the Kenyan side of an unmarked boundary — together one of the largest connected protected landscapes left in East Africa.

The animals are different here because the country is. Gerenuk standing on their hind legs to browse, lesser kudu, oryx — dry-country antelope you will not meet in the Serengeti. Black rhino were brought back into a fenced sanctuary inside the park from the late nineties, and a wild dog programme runs alongside it. Neither is a game drive. Both are the reason the park exists in its current form.

A black rhino standing in dry grass below bare thornbush — Rhino here live inside a fenced sanctuary rather than loose in the park.

A gerenuk standing in dry bush, looking toward the camera

A pool beside an exposed sandy bank and green woodland in Mkomazi National Park

A gerenuk in the dry bush, and a pool below a sandy bank in the park's woodland.

07Kilimanjaro — the north also rises

Five ecosystems, one walk

The mountain is not a safari add-on. You leave farmland in the morning and are in alpine desert three days later, having crossed more vegetation zones than most countries contain. Uhuru Peak stands at 5,895 m.