Gombe Stream National Park

Gombe Stream National Park, located on the western border of Tanzania and Congo, is best known for Jane Goodall, the resident primatologist who spent many years in its forests studying the behavior of endangered chimpanzees.

Located on the wild shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe Stream is a wild place with lush forests and unobstructed views of the lake. Hiking and swimming are also popular activities here, once the day’s chimpanzee viewing expedition is over.

The main attraction of Gombe Stream is of course the chimpanzee families that live protected within the park boundaries. Guided walks are available that take visitors deep into the forest to observe and sit with these extraordinary primates for an entire morning – an incredible experience that is the highlight of many visitors’ trip to Africa. In addition to chimpanzee viewing, many other species of primates live in the rainforests of Gombe Stream. Vervet and colobus monkeys, baboons, forest pigs and small antelopes inhabit the dense forest, in addition to a wide variety of tropical birds.

A cry of excitement erupts from the depths of the forest, immediately followed by a dozen other voices, increasing in volume and tempo to a frenetic crescendo. This is the famous “pant-hoot” call: a bonding ritual that allows participants to identify each other through their individual vocal styles. For the human listener, walking through the ancient forests of Gombe Stream becomes a chilling blast that is also an indicator of impending eye contact with man’s closest genetic relative: the chimpanzee.

Gombe is the smallest of all Tanzania’s national parks: a fragile strip of chimpanzee habitat straddling the steep slopes and river valleys that line the sandy northern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Its chimpanzees – accustomed to human visitors – were made famous by the pioneering work of Jane Goodall, who founded a behavioral research program in 1960 that is now the longest-running study of its kind in the world. The matriarch Fifi, the last surviving member of the original community-who was only three years old when Jane Goodall first set foot in Gombe-is still regularly seen by visitors.

Chimpanzees share about 98 percent of their genes with humans, and no scientific expertise is needed to distinguish the individual repertoires of pants, hooting and hollering that define celebrities, power holders and side characters. Perhaps you will see a glimmer of understanding when you look into the eyes of a chimpanzee, who will evaluate you in retrospect.

At dusk, the dazzling night sky is complemented by the lanterns of hundreds of small wooden boats, floating on the lake like a sprawling city.

About Gombe Stream National Park
Size: 52 km², the smallest national park in Tanzania.
Location: 16 km north of the town of Gombe: 16 km north of Kigoma, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, in western Tanzania.

How to get there
Kigoma is connected to Dar and Arusha by scheduled flights, to Dar and Mwanza by a slow rail service, to Mwanza, Dar and Mbeya by rough dirt roads, and to Mpulungu in Zambia by a weekly ferry.
From Kigoma, local lake cabs take up to three hours to reach Gombe, or motorboats can be chartered, which take less than an hour.

Things to do
Trekking with chimpanzees, hiking, swimming and snorkeling;
Visit Henry Stanley’s famous “Dr. Livingstone I presume” site at Ujiji near Kigoma, and watch the famous dhow builders at work.

NOTE
Strict rules are in place to ensure your protection and that of the chimpanzees. Allow at least two days to see them – this is not a zoo, so it is not possible to know where they will be each day.