Chome Nature Forest Reserve: Shengena and the South Pare Forest

What Chome is

Chome is the forest on top of the South Pare Mountains, and the reason the range has a summit worth walking to. Tanzania Forest Services gives it as 14,283 hectares in Same District, describes it as the largest part of the South Pare Mountains, and identifies it by the bird that carries its name in the marketing: the South Pare white-eye.

It is an important bird area with more than ninety-five recorded bird species, and it is one of the least visited protected forests in northern Tanzania. That is the offer. There is no lodge belt, no gate queue and no circuit; there is a village, a track, a guide and a long climb into cloud forest.

Shengena

Shengena is the high point of the whole Pare range and sits inside the reserve. TFS gives it as 2,462 metres above sea level; Same District Council gives approximately 2,463. Both are the same mountain and the difference does not matter on the ground.

Same District Council puts the usual route start at Chome village, with the walk taking four to six hours return, and notes that a four-wheel-drive vehicle is needed to get to the village in the first place. It also warns that the summit is cold and often in mist — a sharp contrast with the heat of Same town in the valley below — and recommends warm layers and proper boots accordingly.

The views are what people remember. TFS names viewpoints looking out over Mkomazi National Park, the Taita Hills and Tsavo across the border in Kenya, and the sisal plantations lining the Arusha–Dar es Salaam highway far below. Same District Council adds the Nyumba ya Mungu reservoir and, on a clear day, the Usambaras.

The mountain also carries ritual significance for the Pare. Same District Council names Ndiva Nkundu among its traditional sites, used for rain-making prayers and blessings. It is a working religious landscape, not a scenic one, and a local guide is the right way to approach it.

What lives there

Chome is an Eastern Arc forest, which means long isolation and high endemism. Beyond the South Pare white-eye, TFS names the red-capped tailorbird, the Angolan pied colobus, the blue or gentle monkey, the Zanzibar lesser galago, bush pig, the vulnerable black-and-rufous elephant shrew, and the chameleon Rhampholeon viridis.

That list is a reasonable summary of the whole appeal. These are small, quiet, hard-to-see animals in dense forest, and seeing them depends on going slowly with somebody who knows the trails rather than covering distance.

Why an old forest is different

Chome belongs to the Eastern Arc, and the Eastern Arc is old in a way that changes what lives in it. The Eastern Arc Mountains Conservation Endowment Fund describes thirteen mountain blocks strung along roughly 600 kilometres, twelve of them in Tanzania, whose forests have persisted for over thirty million years and were once continuous with the forests of the Congo Basin. Kilimanjaro, by comparison, the fund puts at one to two million years old.

Each block has been an island for long enough that its populations have diverged from their nearest relatives elsewhere. That is why a forest of 14,283 hectares in a range hardly anybody visits has a white-eye named after it, and why the chameleons and amphibians here matter to specialists out of all proportion to the area involved. It is also why the reserve is small and irreplaceable at the same time: there is no second Chome to fall back on.

What there is to do

TFS lists bird watching, hiking, swimming, butterfly trailing, photography, camping, picnicking, traditional music and dance with local brew tasting, and research and educational tours.

• Bird watching — the main specialist reason to come.
• Mountain trekking and day hiking for Shengena itself.
• Forest walking, which is where the chameleons, butterflies and small mammals are.
• Camping, since formal accommodation in the range is thin.
• Traditional music and dance in the villages around the reserve.
• Village visits in the terraced farming country on the approach.

Conservation, and who does it

Chome is managed by Tanzania Forest Services, but the day-to-day protection is shared with the villages around it. The Eastern Arc Mountains Conservation Endowment Fund has supported village environmental committees on the reserve’s boundary — at Kwa Doli and Msindo among others — equipping and training them for patrol work against illegal logging and encroachment, which are the two pressures on the forest.

The fund’s own account of that work is unusually candid about why it was needed. The committees existed but carried no visible authority: without uniforms or formal recognition, members were ignored by their own neighbours, and women on the committees faced particular scepticism in a role assumed to be male. Uniforms, boots and training changed how the committees were treated, by villagers and by the people they were policing alike. It is a small illustration of how community forest protection actually works, and a useful corrective to the idea that a reserve boundary on a map protects anything by itself.

The approach through Same District’s mountain wards — Suji, Bwambo, and the villages at Mbaga, Gonja and Chome — is terraced smallholding country, farmed on irrigation systems the Pare developed over centuries. The forest above and the farms below are the same water system, which is the argument that carries locally for protecting it.

One honest gap: no gazette notice declaring Chome a nature forest reserve could be located for this guide, in contrast to Amani, whose 1997 declaration order is published. TFS manages and promotes Chome as a nature forest reserve, and that is the status recorded here; the date of that upgrade is not stated because it could not be confirmed against a primary source.

The Tanzania Forest Services management also decides what you pay. TFS reserves sit outside the TANAPA tariff booklet that fixes the charge at a national park gate, and no current published TFS figure for Chome could be confirmed for this guide, so none is quoted. Treat reserve entry and the village guide as two separate costs to settle before setting off, and see the guide to what conservation charges add to a Tanzanian trip for how the published tariffs are structured and where they run out.

Getting there and when to come

TFS gives access by road from Kilimanjaro or Dar es Salaam via Same town, which it puts at about 117 kilometres from Kilimanjaro and 444 kilometres from Dar es Salaam. From Same the road climbs into the mountains, and the last stretch to Chome village needs clearance and four-wheel drive. How the South Pare approach connects to the rest of a northern itinerary is covered in the guide to driving and flying between Tanzania’s regions.

The bimodal pattern applies — Vuli from October to December, Masika from March to May, on the Tanzania Meteorological Authority’s definitions — but the summit generates its own weather and mist is possible in any month. The practical planning point is the access track rather than the walk: heavy rain is what stops people reaching the trailhead. The national picture of Tanzania’s rainfall regimes sets the Pare calendar against the rest of the country.

Common questions about Chome Nature Forest Reserve