Tarangire Baobabs

The tree that makes the park look like nowhere else

Baobabs are the reason a photograph of Tarangire is recognisable at a glance. The Serengeti has plains and kopjes; Manyara has forest against an escarpment; Tarangire has enormous grey trunks standing over the ridges and valleys of the Maasai Steppe, and an elephant beside one is a picture no other park on the circuit can produce.

What TANAPA publishes about them

The authority’s figures are unusually generous and unusually specific: baobabs can live up to three thousand years and can grow trunks reaching more than a hundred feet in circumference.

It goes further, and this is the part worth carrying around the park. TANAPA describes the huge baobab as a complete ecosystem in itself. Its nooks and crannies hold bee hives or are occupied by small mammals such as genet and civet. Its enormous flowers are pollinated by fruit bats. Many of the trees are hollow, and the authority records that hollow baobabs here provided shelter for wandering bands of hunter-gatherers in the past.

Abandoned termite mounds do the same work at ground level. TANAPA notes that the park has a remarkable number of them, built of soil brought up from below and held together with termite saliva, and that when abandoned they house dwarf mongoose, pangolin, snakes and aardvark. Mongoose colonies in old mounds are among the more reliable sightings on a drive.

Reading a baobab

Two things are worth looking for once the trees stop being scenery.

Elephant damage. Baobab wood is fibrous and water-bearing, and elephants strip and gouge the trunks in the dry season to get at it. Many of the park’s trees carry deep scars; some have been hollowed to the point of collapse. This is a natural process rather than a crisis, and it is one of the clearest illustrations available of what a dry-season concentration of large animals does to a landscape.

The season. Baobabs are deciduous and leafless for much of the dry months, which is when most visitors see them — bare, pale and skeletal. In the green season they carry leaves and, briefly, the huge white night-opening flowers that the fruit bats pollinate. The two look like different trees.

Where to see them

Throughout the park, and particularly on the ridges and valleys south of the open plains in the north. The park’s main gate is 121 kilometres from Arusha on tarmac, and the northern river circuits carry plenty of trees, but the country further south is where the density is greatest.

Tarangire is among the parks where TANAPA lists balloon safaris, which is the one way to see the baobabs from above and understand how they are distributed — see balloon safaris and photographic safaris. Walking safaris with an armed guide are also listed for this park, and a baobab on foot is a different object entirely from one seen through a roof hatch.

Common questions