Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania Hotels and City Guide

Dar Es Salaam - Top Experiences

Tanzania's Top Experience: The Serengeti National Park

Tanzania is very poor despite its plentiful natural resources, but it has a wealth of unique attractions for the adventurous traveller with good hotels, lodges and safari camps. Dar es Salaam is the stepping-stone to the cradle of Africa’s extraordinary wildlife where dinosaurs once roamed. Spectacular natural beauty includes Lake Tanganyika, Africa’s deepest lake, snow-capped Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain which is also the world’s highest free-standing mountain, dense tropical forests, grassy plains that stretch to far horizons, and coral beaches.

Names like Ngorongora Crater and Serengeti, a World Heritage Site and the 7th Natural Wonder of the World, evoke the essence of raw Africa where the great annual migrations of three million animals occur and life moves relentlessly to the rhythm of the rains. The Serengeti National Park is a national treasure, possibly one of the last of the world’s great wildlife reserves, now under serious threat as the Government plans to build a controversial highway through it and across the animal migration routes.

Enjoy a one-hour mystical experience by boarding a hot-air balloon at dawn, taking off through the ethereal early morning mist and rising above the plains of Serengeti where you drift with the wind. The balloon will rise to over 1,000ft or drop to as low as treetop height. A full English breakfast with champagne is served in the bush at the end of the balloon ride. Balloon safaris are offered to guests staying at any of the central Serengeti lodges or camps.

Tanzania's Top Experience: The Great Rift Valley

The Great Rift Valley is 6,000 miles long from Jordan to Beira on the coast of Mozambique. It cuts north through Tanzania from north to south and can be seen from space. It is a result of Earth’s shifting tectonic plates over 20 million years ago, its active volcanoes reminders of this instability, a continuing geological process which will eventually form a new continent that will split from Africa.

It is for its abundance of game that tourists visit Tanzania, but ornithologists will delight in more than 500 species of birdlife, including great flocks of pink flamingos on the lakes, while palaeontologists will find dinosaur fossil digs exhilarating.

To read more about Tanzania’s National Parks, see our Outdoor Attractions guide.

Hotels in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania