Tanzania Geography & Climate

Tanzania covers about 945,000 square kilometres in East Africa, with a highland interior, a coastal plain, and the Great Rift Valley running through it in two branches.

Kilimanjaro

A dormant volcano rising to 5,895 metres from plains at around a thousand — the highest point in Africa and the tallest free-standing mountain on earth, meaning it is not part of a range. Its glaciers have lost the great majority of their ice since 1900 and are expected to disappear within decades.

The Rift and the lakes

The western branch of the rift holds Lake Tanganyika, the second-deepest lake in the world at nearly 1,500 metres and holding an enormous number of endemic cichlid species. The eastern branch holds shallow alkaline lakes, including Natron, which is caustic enough to be the main breeding site for East Africa’s lesser flamingos. Lake Victoria, in the north-west, is the largest lake in Africa.

Ngorongoro

A volcanic caldera about twenty kilometres across with intact walls six hundred metres high, formed when a mountain that may have rivalled Kilimanjaro collapsed. It holds a permanent concentration of wildlife and is UNESCO-listed, as is nearby Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakeys found hominin remains that rewrote human prehistory.

The Serengeti

Short-grass plains continuous with Kenya’s Maasai Mara, across which the wildebeest migration moves in an annual circuit driven by rainfall.

The far west

Beyond the rift wall the land falls away to the Congo basin, and the parks there — Katavi, Mahale, Gombe — are forested, humid and reached mainly by boat or light aircraft. Gombe, where Jane Goodall began work on chimpanzees in 1960, is the smallest national park in the country and one of the most consequential places in the history of the life sciences.

The coast and islands

Around 1,400 kilometres of Indian Ocean shore with coral reef and mangrove, and the islands of Zanzibar, Pemba and Mafia offshore.

Tanzania lies just south of the equator, so temperature varies little through the year and the seasons are defined by rain. Altitude does the rest, and the range is extreme — from 30°C on the coast to permanent ice at 5,895 metres.

Two rainy seasons, in the north

The long rains fall roughly March to May and the short rains in November and December, with dry spells between. The south and west have a single wet season from November to April instead, which is why the southern parks close in a different pattern from the northern ones.

The coast and Zanzibar

Hot and humid year round, 26 to 33°C, moderated by the monsoon winds — the kaskazi from the north-east between November and March and the kusi from the south-west from April to October. The sea is warm enough to swim in every month.

The highlands

Arusha, Moshi and the southern highlands sit between one and two thousand metres and are pleasantly temperate, with cool nights that need a jacket. Game drives leave before dawn and are genuinely cold even near the equator.

Kilimanjaro

A climb passes through five climate zones in a week — cultivated slopes, rainforest, heath, alpine desert and arctic summit — and the temperature range from base to top is around forty degrees. Summit night regularly falls below −15°C with wind.

The migration

The wildebeest circuit is driven entirely by rainfall, following new grass. This is why the herds are on the southern plains in the wet months and in the north by mid-year, and why their position varies year to year rather than following a calendar.