Tarangire’s elephant game viewing is excellent year-round. It simply can no longer be considered a seasonal destination.

It was drier than when I visited the park only 12 days ago. Then there were many pools of standing water and a lush green veneer covered everything. For our visit this time it was still green, but much less water and dust followed every vehicle.

We left Tarangire Treetops before dawn with our picnic lunch. The drive to the gate is about an hour and was pretty uneventful, although the morning sunrise was spectacular. After we entered the park, Blair Devermont spotted a leopard.

She was gesturing to us wildly as we approached from behind, but the leopard slid away into the tall grass before we got a chance to see it. Leopard are skittish everywhere, but especially in Tarangire. This was a hunting reserve less than 20 years ago, and it takes multiple generations of leopard to become accustomed to game viewing vehicles.

We continued around the Silale Swamp road and enjoyed our picnic lunch at one of the finest picnic sites in all of Tanzania’s parks. New bathrooms, a beautiful area on a hillside overlooking the great swamp, and all shaded by magnificent trees. It’s the perfect spot for my lecture on Stanley and Livingstone, since all the great explorers coming from Zanzibar had to cross swamps like this.

We then proceeded up the track on the east side of the Tarangire sand river. It wasn’t long before we saw elephants. Similar to most game viewing, successful elephant viewing requires absolute quiet. I’m convinced of all these magnificent animals’ special senses, hearing is the most acute. They tolerate the whole gamut of car noises, but the variety of human voices is infinitely greater and disturbs them.

This doesn’t always mean angers them, although it can. But more often, it means that the game viewing experience will just not be as good. The matriarch will simply lead her family away from you.

Our group behaved magnificently! The first group of two families of 17 included a number of very young babies that performed as if in a school play! And we then saw a group of 50 coming from a mud bath towards the river. We positioned the vehicles carefully, maintained absolutely silence, and had one of the finest encounters I’ve ever experienced!

We returned to Treetops via the Boundary Hill track, one of the most beautiful little cuts through park woodlands in Tanzania. On the way back outside the park we stopped for pictures of everyone’s head through a hole in a baobab. The baobabs are magnificent in Tarangire, like the sunsets and sunrises, natural dynamic sculptures incapable of being plated on a photograph or painting.

My nephew, Tim Heck, smiles a lot, but I began to worry that he had some physical disease. He is a Blue Man in Chicago, capable at the end of each performance of standing in front of throngs of taunting people expressionless as directed. But he simply can’t do that here. Every time I see him, he’s smiling!

That evening we had sundowners overlooking Tarangire from a bluff near the lodge. To our north was the great Rift Valley escarpment with shimmering Lake Manyara at its base. To the east were the formidable hills of Monduli, and to our south, the beginning of the extensive Maasai steppe. The sun settled through the clouds like a curtain being drawn over the evening mist. This is a raucous and boisterous crowd, but I think I remember a moment or two of complete silence as the three-quarters moon appeared.

Don’t consider Tarangire only a seasonal park any longer.

For several years, now, I’ve been writing how wonderful Tarangire National Park is at any time of the year. So many guide books claim otherwise. They’re wrong.

Until the early 1980s, Tarangire was a hunting preserve. The 2200 sq. miles is the best elephant habitat in all of northern Tanzania and Kenya. It’s even better than Amboseli, which is famous for elephants.

One of my clients, Hans Wede, a successful “numbers” businessman from Denmark, estimated that we saw 500 elephants during our three game drives in the park. We saw fights, got charged, saw a half dozen newborns, watched a family for 40 minutes taking a mud bath and generally had one of the finest elephant viewing experiences I’ve myself had in 37 years!

And this is supposed to be the time you don’t go to Tarangire, because the elephants aren’t here.

In many regards, Tarangire is more like a southern than East African wilderness. It is heavily wooded and defined by its great Tarangire sand river and a number of other smaller sand rivers that flow into the Tarangire.

We spent the last two days in Tarangire avoiding elephants. We saw a lot more than just elephants, by the way, including a magnificent male lion (and several more females), lots of bat-eared fox and jackal, giraffe, lots of impala, zebra, buffalo, klipspringer and Tarangire’s outstanding birdlife. At the campfire during sundowners, my clients watched a leopard walk by. But elephants were the feature.

This is the wet season. Now admittedly there are some disadvantages to coming now: very hot, very humid, wet with great thunderstorms, and all this means more and more tse-tse fly. But it also means it’s a beautiful time. The veld is lush and green, the sand river is flowing and drawing all the migrant shore birds, and the forests are abloom with the earliest orchids.

And, contrary to virtually all the popular guide books, there are lots and lots of elephants!

Like so much in East African tourism, the notion that Tarangire is a seasonal park is based in early fact that was never revised as conditions changed. A half century ago when safari tourism began we were confronted with the catastrophic slaughter of elephants. Ninety-five percent of Kenya’s elephants were wiped out; probably 60% of Tanzania’s.

Those that remained were understandably skittish. Their behavior kept them away from people as much as possible. Sand rivers, like Tarangire, were their only source for water in the dry season, so they had to come to the sand rivers, then, even if tourists were waiting to watch them. Water flows nearly continuously under the sand, even in the driest times, and elephants then dig for it.

(My safari group this time even noticed that the elephants preferred to dig for water, even when it was flowing not far from their holes! We were at Samburu earlier, and that area is very dry right now in contrast to Tarangire. There were areas of streaming water in the Ewaso Nyiro sand river, but on one game drive we noticed that the elephants actually preferred to dig holes further down stream where no surface water was streaming. The filtered water through the sand is cleaner and sweeter than surface water.)

When the wet season came and water was everywhere, the elephants abandoned the sand rivers for locations with fewer people.

That’s no longer necessary. The elephant population has rebounded and elephant poaching is well under control. And Tarangire’s ecosystem beyond its sand river is great for elephant. So while there may, indeed, be even a more spectacular elephant experience in the dry season (July – November), you’d find that difficult to explain to my client, Joyce Hassell, who had a 5-ton bull’s ears practically wrapped around her Landrover. Or to my other client, Jodi Eckenhoff, who figures she took about as many pictures of elephant as we decided we’d seen: 500!