Gombe Stream National Park is a small (52
square kilometers) nature reserve on a thin forest strip in western Tanzania. It
was established in 1968. The landscape of the park includes valleys, and the
forest ranges from grassland to sparse forest to thick rainforest. There are
also a lot of water systems, including rivers and the famous Lake Tanganyika. The park is about 25 kilometers from the city
of Kigoma which you can reach from Dar or Arusha by flying, from Dar or Mwanza
by train, from Mwanza, Dar and Mbeya by roads and from Mpulungu by ferry. From
Kigoma you can reach Gombe by taxi or by boat.
The most well known animal in the park are the chimpanzees,
but there is a vast diversity of other monkeys as well, including red-tailed
and red colobus, vervet monkeys an baboons. Also many other animals typical to
this kind of environment can be seen in Gombe, including leopards, bushpigs,
snakes, hippopotamus and over 200 different species of birds.
Gombe was made famous by the groundbreaking
chimpanzee research made by Jane Goodall. Also the location where Henry Stanley
famously found David Livingstone in 1871 with the famous “Dr Livingstone I
presume” is located close by at Ujiji near Kigoma. Gombe is a very popular
tourist attraction. Things to do include trekking, hiking, swimming and
snorkeling. The best time to see the famous chimpanzees is during the wet
season (February-June and November-mid December). It can however be quite
expensive to visit to park. In addition to the cost of getting there you are
typically looking at costs including a $100 per person entry fee, $10 guide fee
per group, $10 tip for guide, about $40 for food and $20 for accommodation per
person.
As in many natural reserves in Africa the wildlife
of the park is under a threat by human activity and wildlife populations are diminishing.
Lands occupied by locals often hinder animals from traveling between protected grounds.
Locals often live in quite poor conditions and hunt wildlife for food, to
protect their crops or for safety reasons.
Jane Goodalls famous research began in 1960.
She established a research station in Gombe where she spent months tracking and
observing the chimpanzees. She was very interested in behavior, emotions and
personality of her subjects and bonds between the chimpanzees. She also made
the groundbreaking finding that chimpanzees use tools when hunting termites out
of their nests. She also observed very aggressive behavior from the
chimpanzees, including hunting and killing other monkeys and violence inside
groups of chipamzees.
