Mahale Mountains National Park

Mahale isn't a safari in the conventional sense. There are no game drives. There are no Land Cruisers. There is a lake, a forest, and chimpanzees that have known the human researchers since the 1960s.

The setting alone is the headline. Mahale rises 1,700 metres out of the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, the deepest and second-largest freshwater lake in the world (the only deeper one is Baikal). The park is unreachable by road. You arrive by Cessna Caravan to a grass strip outside the park, then a 90-minute dhow across the lake to camp. The arrival itself — green mountains crowding the shoreline, blue water clearer than most swimming pools, a beach with no other footprints — is one of the great safari approaches.

The reason to come is the M-group chimpanzees. About 60 individuals, habituated continuously since 1965 by Kyoto University researchers. You don't see them every day — they range across 1,000 square kilometres of forest — but during dry season (July–October) they descend toward camp altitudes to feed on figs, and the trackers find them within 90 minutes most mornings. The hour you spend with them (the legal maximum, strictly enforced) is closer to an interview than a sighting. They look at you. They argue. They sleep. They eat. A juvenile occasionally runs over and slaps your boot. We've worked here many seasons; the encounter has never become routine.

What you do the rest of the time is just as important. Snorkelling Lake Tanganyika from the beach, in 30 metres of visibility, among the rock-cichlid species that fed Darwin's intellectual descendants. Forest walks for the eight other primate species (red colobus, blue monkey, red-tailed) and butterflies you've never seen. Dhow sundowner on the lake. The pace is intentionally slow. The setting is intentionally unrushed.