Tarangire National Park in Tanzania offers a great alternative to Serengeti’s crowds, Matt Covarr discovered.

Bwana, this place, it is going very, very far,” the Tarangire National Park warden points out, as we pore over a dry-season map of this seemingly endless wilderness in northern Tanzania.

My wife, zoology researcher Halszka, and I had decided on this area as a place to kick-start a research project involving zebra. It is part of a year-long exchange programme between the Tanzanian Wildlife Research Institute and Pretoria University.

I’d never heard of Tarangire, but within a few hours of being there, it became clear that this certainly is an overlooked Tanzanian wildlife destination.

It was known as The Tarangire to the likes of Finch Hatton and Bror von Blixen of Out of Africa fame. In the 1920s and 30s they lead elaborate hunting parties into this lonely place ensuring that clients “bagged the finest lion or took down the biggest tusker”. It offers a landscape littered with baobab trees, teeming with elephant and fed by a continuous flow of life, the Tarangire River.

The Tarangire National Park, as it has been know since the 1970s, has changed little since those days, except for the trickle of visitors now arriving to savour what must be one of the African continent’s great wildlife experiences.

With a far higher elephant density than any other Tanza¬nian reserve and second only to the Serengeti in terms of mammal densities, Taran¬gire remains unjustly over¬shadowed by the alluring names of its northern neighbours − Serengeti (± 200 km away), Ngo¬ron¬goro Crater (± 110 km) and Lake Manyara (± 90 km).

For the increasing number of South Africans venturing up to East Africa in their own vehicles, Tarangire offers a special wildlife experience.

And it is readily accessible to South Africans − the direct drive from Plettenberg Bay along good tar roads took us an easy nine days in a Land Rover.

Situated only 120 km southwest of Arusha, the safari hub of Tanzania, Tarangire can be reached by a good tar road which ends 10 km from the park gate.

After the tar, you’ll roll onto the first of thousands of kilometres of dusty tracks weaving like arteries through a variety of landscapes and ecosystems.