Tanzania

There aren’t many places on the globe that fire a traveler’s imagination like Tanzania. This biggest of East African countries has an unbelievable spread of enticements: wildlife-watching of the finest caliber, landscapes that tumble from snowy volcano crowns to palm-lined seacoast, a human face of more than 100 different ethnic groups that presents a spectrum of old and new Africa.

It’s easy to associate Tanzania purely with hordes of wildebeest, steely-eyed lions, and trumpeting elephants. But there’s much more to the country. The Indian Ocean coastline and archipelagos have world-class beaches as well as some impressive cultural landmarks: not least the island of Zanzibar’s Stone Town, a historic Swahili settlement that long served as a maritime trading center for Arab and Portuguese merchants. And you’ve got one heck of an introduction to urban Africa in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam—a level of chaos that may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but absolutely fascinating for those willing to dive in headfirst.

But it is, indeed, Tanzania’s unparalleled natural heritage that steals the show every time. The parks and preserves here are legendary: Serengeti, Lake Manyara, Tarangire, Arusha, and more. Ngorongoro Crater, its caldera grasslands thronged with ungulates and relentlessly hunted by one of the densest populations of lions anywhere, is a landscape of mythic stature. Outside the world-famous sanctuaries of the greater Rift Valley, southern Tanzania has one of the biggest and wildest parks anywhere on Earth: the 21,100-square-mile Selous Game Reserve, a place where you can confront Africa at its most primal. And on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe Stream National Park hosts arguably the most famous wild apes on the planet: the chimpanzees that were the subject of Jane Goodall’s pioneering field study.

If all of that wasn’t enough, Mount Kilimanjaro—Africa’s greatest mountain—makes for one of the world’s greatest treks: Multiday hikes to the top, 19,341 feet above sea level, take in thick rainforest and dreamlike moorland full of strange outsized plants.

The firsthand experience of Tanzania goes beyond anything a National Geographic documentary can prepare you for. Perhaps no place else in Africa puts on such a grand spectacle; even so, the images that most deeply resonate are often the small-scale ones—your footprint erased by Indian Ocean surf, an anonymous smile glimpsed from the road, or the eruption of birdsong greeting a Serengeti sunrise.