Gombe National Park

– “Untamed lush forests on the shores of a lake” –

Situated on the wild shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe National Park is located in the western Kigoma Region, Tanzania. The smallest of all the Tanzania’s national parks, its untamed lush forests are home to high levels of diversity, making it an increasingly popular tourist destination.
Accessible only by boat, the park was made famous as the location where Jane Goodall pioneered her behavioral research conducted on the chimpanzee populations. The research program now stands as the longest-running study of its kind in the world.
The chimpanzee families – habituated to human visitors – live protected in the park’s boundaries. Guided walks are available that take visitors deep into the forest to observe and sit with the extraordinary primates for an entire morning. Visitors are often welcomed by an excited whoop that erupts from deep in the forest, followed immediately by a dozen other voices, rising in volume and tempo and pitch to a frenzied shrieking crescendo. The famous ‘pant-hoot’ call is a bonding ritual that allows the participants to identify each other through their individual vocal stylizations.
Besides chimpanzee viewing, many other species of primates live in Gombe Stream’s tropical forests. Vervet and colobus monkeys, baboons, forest pigs, and small antelopes inhabit the dense forest, in addition to a wide variety of tropical birdlife.
Visitors can also engage in a number of activities like hiking and swimming once the day’s expedition to see the chimpanzees is over.