Udzungwa Mountains National Park

Udzungwa Mountains National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Udzungwa is the hikers' park of southern Tanzania, a wall of forested mountains rising from the sugar-cane fields of the Kilombero valley, six to seven hours by road from Dar es Salaam and an hour beyond Mikumi, and it has no roads inside it and no game drives: everything is done on foot with a park ranger, who is compulsory, from the headquarters at Mang'ula. It is therefore sold almost always with Mikumi, as the walking day of a two- to four-day safari from Dar es Salaam or from Zanzibar by flight: a day of game drives on the Mikumi plains, a night there or at one of the simple lodges and camps at Mang'ula, and a morning climbing to the Sanje waterfall before the drive back.

That half-day hike, four to five hours return, steep in places, through forest with monkeys overhead to the pools below and above a fall of 170 metres, with a swim in the plunge pool, is what nine visitors in ten do, and it is a good walk. The three-day trekking tours add a second trail, or camp on the longer routes: the Mwanihana peak, 2,080 metres, two to three days through every forest zone to the grassland on top, and the Lumemo trail, five or six days along a river valley, both needing the operator's camping equipment, porters and an armed ranger because of buffalo and elephants. The park fees per person per day, the ranger's fee and the camping fees are paid by card at the gate and are included in the tours. Independent travellers can reach Mang'ula on the buses from Dar es Salaam or Morogoro to Ifakara, or on the TAZARA railway.

Visiting Udzungwa Mountains National Park: what you will see

The park was gazetted in 1992, opened by the founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature, and covers 1,990 square kilometres of the Udzungwa range, the largest and richest block of the Eastern Arc, a chain of ancient crystalline mountains running from southern Kenya through Tanzania that have carried rainforest, watered by the Indian Ocean, continuously for some thirty million years and have been called the Galápagos of Africa for the number of species that evolved on them in isolation. Udzungwa is the only place in East Africa where unbroken forest still runs from 250 metres to above 2,000, through lowland, submontane and montane forest and bamboo to the grassland of the plateau, with Luhomero at 2,576 metres the summit. A quarter of its 2,500 plants grow nowhere else, among them wild relatives of the African violet.

It has two primates of its own: the Udzungwa red colobus, with its red cap, which visitors see on the Sanje trail, and the Sanje crested mangabey, unknown to science until 1979, along with black-and-white colobus, Sykes' and vervet monkeys, yellow baboons and several bushbabies; a third, the kipunji, described in 2005 as the first new African monkey genus in eighty years, lives in the forest on the park's southern edge. A partridge discovered in 1991, whose nearest relatives are in Asia, the rufous-winged sunbird, a giant elephant shrew described in 2008 and a chameleon named in 2009 are among the other endemics, and more than 400 birds are recorded. Elephants, buffalo, leopards and duikers live in the forest and are met mostly as tracks and dung. The Sanje river drops off the escarpment in three falls, and the Prince Bernhard fall near the gate is a short walk for those without the legs for Sanje.

Udzungwa Mountains National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park headquarters at Mang'ula is open daily from about 7.30 am, and hikes must start in the morning. The dry season from June to October is the best time, with firm trails and cooler air, though the forest is humid and the paths steep in any month; the short rains in November and December are manageable, and the long rains from March to May make the trails slippery and leech-ridden and the waterfall magnificent.

Start the Sanje hike early to swim before the midday heat, and carry more water than seems necessary. Allow a half-day for Sanje, three days for Mwanihana. Mikumi is an hour north, Ruaha a day's drive west through Iringa, and the Kilombero floodplain with its own endemic birds lies at the mountains' foot.