Tarangire National Park

Tarangire is where the elephants come. In the dry season — July through October — the Tarangire River becomes the only water source for hundreds of kilometres, and the elephants arrive in their hundreds, moving in extended family groups through forests of ancient baobab. Some of these trees are over a thousand years old. The landscape has a prehistoric quality to it: twisted, silver-barked, monumental. Tarangire is often bypassed in favour of the Serengeti and Ngorongoro, and that is precisely what makes it worth including. Quieter, wilder, less driven-over, it rewards the traveller who takes the time. The birding is exceptional. The lion prides are large. And on a late afternoon with the light slanting through the baobabs and a hundred elephants moving through the river sand below, there is nowhere on earth quite like it.