Hi, I'm Gary Bembridge of Tips For Travellers. In this video I'm going to
take you through the must-see and must do things in Tanzania. I came to Tanzania
expecting to see incredible things, and it just completely exceeded my
expectations! So in this video I'm going to recommend the things that I think you
should absolutely include in any visit to Tanzania. So let's go take a look at
my recommendations which I filmed as I toured around the country.
I am in Ngorongoro which actually ia a conservation area, and so let me explain
the difference between a Conservation Area and a National Park. Conservation
Area basically means that humans and animals can live in the area. National
Park is for animals only. So Ngorongoro Conservation Area
is about 160 kilometres from Arusha, and it's a very magical place. The actual
conservation area includes a couple of things including about 80,000 Maasai
people who live here. But the most significant part of Ngorongoro is the
crater. It's the world's largest unbroken
caldera in the world. It's a basically a huge open amphitheater. The walls are 600
meters high. There's 260 kilometers square inside. It's basically a big flat
area. It has open grasslands, it has swamps, it has lakes (both fresh and salt
water lakes), but what's really amazing about this place which was created from
a volcano, is that it's home to up to 30,000 animals at any one time. You can
see the "big five" here. So on the day that we visited we got to see four of the "big
five". We saw elephant, we saw a rhino, we saw Buffalo and we saw lion.
The only one we didn't see was leopard. What's amazing about i Ngorongoro is it feels
like someone's just gone and sprinkled animals everywhere - in some parts
everywhere you look, as far as you can see, there are animals. There are zebras,
wildebeest, gazelles, ostriches, warthog. We saw so many animals. Just
incredible scenes of animals - in groups, in herds, huge migrations of animals.
It really was incredible. That's Ngorongoro. It is definitely an absolute must,
must do.
Serengeti. This is another of must do things to see and do in Tanzania.
So the Serengeti is an amazing place. It is over 13,000 square kilometers
large and it is probably the foremost national park in the world. Now Serengeti
in Swahili, the local Tanzanian language, means "endless plains that stretch right
up to the sky" - and it is incredible because it's a huge vast flat plain. It's
particularly renowned for the migration which happens when you have a million
wildebeest, couple hundred thousand zebras, a couple of hundred thousand
gazelles and animals just moving from the dry part of the country to the wetter
part of the country to find food and water. It was created in 1951. It's Tanzania's
oldest National Park. So the great thing about the Serengeti is that you will
get to see the "big five". In one day I saw four of the "big five":
elephant, buffalo, lion and leopard but didn't see rhino. But on top of that we also saw
so much wildlife. We saw huge amounts of hippos, we saw gazelles everywhere,
zebras, baboons, monkeys, giraffe. Pretty much every animal you name we
could see. That's the Serengeti, an incredible place to visit
within Tanzania, and probably one of the most famous places in the world to go. It
is an absolute must do.
Here I am in the Tarangire National Park, which is 120 kilometers from Arusha and
160 kilometers from the Kilimanjaro Airport, so very convenient if you're
flying in from there. It's actually the sixth largest park within Tanzania and
was the fifth to the opened after independence from Britain. Tarangire
National Park was established in 1971. In terms of big attractions: there's lots
of baobab trees everywhere and also what's very important about this
particular park is in the dry season it's a real magnet for animals because
of the Tarangire River. So during the dry season lasting from July to September
it's very difficult for animals to find water, but the river keeps flowing and so
a lot of the big animals that have left during the wetter seasons (when they move
to other parts of the country where they can get great vegetation) they
tend to migrate back here. So it's particularly good to come here in the
dry season. So this is Tarangire National Park. It's a beautiful park and
definitely one of the must do things.
A must-do thing, and I strongly recommend you do this if you're on a first-time
visit. is to go to a Maasai village. Now the Maasai are people you'll see as
you travel around Tanzania, and are very distinctive as they're wearing cloth
robes often in red, blues etc. But they are the indigenous people and a
very important tribe within Tanzania, and across the country you can go to
different villages which help explain some of the heritage, the history and the
way the people live. The one I went to was near Ngorongoro, and at the village
you'll see some traditional dancing and singing. They'll show you how they make
fire without using any sort of combustibles (no matches etc). They also
then show you their houses. How the houses are made. You go to see inside a house and
then also you go to visit the school, and then you get a chance to buy some of a
beautiful craft work. The great thing about going to the village is
you get a real sense and understanding of the Maasai people of Tanzania and
also gives you a chance to give back to the community.
So a couple of ways you could see these must-see things. You could do what I did,
which is go on a tour which included all of them. So I went with Titan Travel and
they had a tour called "The Wild Plains of Tanzania", and we went to all of these
places and all the stuff in the video I talked about and were filmed was on
that particular tour. Or you could, of course, do them as individual tours. What's
important to note is you do need to go into all of these places in a 4x4 - so you
will need to book either a whole package tour or individual tours to each of
these places. So there you have it, those are my tips, advice and recommendations
on things to do if you're in Tanzania. I'd love it if you "liked" the video,
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