Detailed Overview
Gombe Stream National Park, the smallest national park in Tanzania, is located in the western region of Kigoma on the wild shores of Lake Tanganyika. Its main attraction are the chimpanzee families that live in the park. This park became famous for Jane Goodall, the resident primatologist who spent many years in its forests studying the behavior of the endangered chimpanzees. But hiking and swimming are also popular activities here, once the day’s expedition to see the chimpanzees is over. Guided walks are available that take visitors deep into the forest to observe and sit with the extraordinary primates for an entire morning — an incredible experience and one that is the highlight of many visitors’ trips to Africa. Besides chimpanzee viewing, many other species of primates live in Gombe Stream’s tropical forests. Vervet and colobus monkeys, baboons, forest pigs and small antelopes inhabit the dense forest, in addition to a wide variety of tropical birdlife.
Lake Tanganyika is the second largest freshwater lake in the world in terms of volume and the second deepest lake after Lake Baikal in Siberia.
8 km down the lake shore from Kigoma, Ujiji is one of Africa’s oldest market villages that was once an important base for the goods and slave trade from the Congo. Here, the two British explorers “Richard Burton” and “John Speke” were the first Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika in February 1858. This is where the famous words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” were spoken by the explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley when he found the famous explorer David Livingstone, believed to be dead, in November 1871.
