We believe Tarangire Conservation Area might well be the future of the Tanzanian Safari. It is a pioneering initiative to involve all interested parties in a specific wildlife area -landowners, villagers, farmers, tribal communities - in a wider view of resource management that embraces all under one common banner, that of conservation management. The hope is that by involving all the main players, conflicts can be resolved, new economic opportunities opened up and the traditional habitats and migration routes used by African mammals for millions of years will be preserved.
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There has long been a need to protect these traditional migration routes and eco-systems that support healthy wildlife populations outside of the existing formally protected areas. These areas often contain marginalized populations that have had their lands taken away without their consent for uses in tourism and as a result become the main recruitment centres for poachers. Wildlife Management Areas are created to redress this imbalance and create sustainable revenues from wildlife resources through partnerships and nature-based enterprises between the local villages and conservation-minded tour operators
 
Likewise, the accommodation. It might be our own safari fly-camp, carefully blended into the surrounding landscape for our privileged viewing with minimum disruption for the animals. It's the only way to be certain of being at the very core of the wildlife experience but it must be done properly. Our experienced and efficient safari crews ensure our adventure does not lack the elemental comforts of a holiday so that our isolation is not at the expense of a certain, deserved contentment. If it is that pioneering, adventurous feeling that spurred on the early settlers and explorers, then this is the surest way to recapture it...
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baobabTarangire Conservation Area is a twenty thousand-acre zone leased to us by the local villages. The Conservancy protects the main wet-season migration route into the neighbouring Tarangire National Park, and provides the animals with a natural sanctuary from the demands of modern farming methods, extensive deforestation by the charcoal collectors and years of indiscriminate poaching. In return for allowing the area to be returned to a state of nature, Tarangire Conservation Company have entered into a Wildlife Management Plan with the local villages which provides them with a percentage of the direct revenue from each client that enters the Conservancy. This revenue is used by the villages to construct water-pumps, boreholes, schools and dispensaries.

 

 
 

What makes this whole project unique is not only that revenue goes directly into the local community; not only that members of these same communities are being employed by tourism-based services within the area; but that the empowerment of the community has caused a resurgence in cultural and tribal pride and a documented fall in poaching, deforestation and charcoal-burning. Tarangire Conservation Area is an undoubted Community Conservation success - proof that not only does the empowerment of the villages and their involvement in the conservation process, actually work. It pays dividends as well.

 
 

For visitors, with the National Parks becoming increasingly overcrowded, Tarangire Conservation Area offers the opportunity for a little diversity from the vehicle-based daytime game drives and does so in a remote wilderness area, free of the minibus hordes. Its isolation from the National Parks not only benefits the villagers. Visitors are allowed to experience the nocturnal glimpses of wildlife on a night drive, to experience the African savannah from the comparatively unique perspective of a foot safari and visit a Tanzanian village that has profited from their experiences.

 

  
 

There are two individual eco-lodges inside the Conservation area to cater to the individual needs of the clients, Naitolia and Tarangire TreeTops, each different from both each other and, indeed, anywhere else in Northern Tanzania. Both of these eco-lodges were constructed with the active participation of the villages and represent a new era in community co-operation. All members of the community are involved - the local craftsmen from the local villages building each lodge using local renewable materials from the surrounding regions; the village councils sit on the board of directors; the woman empowerment projects receiving direct funding from client revenue which has also built the local school. It is this pioneering partnership and the strict compliance with environmental regulation and sustainable resource use that has attracted the interest of the Green Globe programme and The World Bank. Don't just take our word for it.

 

Tarangire Conservation Area is a large tract of undisturbed African bush that provides the range of space the wildlife needs to continue it's primeval cycle. That provides the local communities with economic opportunities to allow them to continue their lives with cultural pride and environmental security. That ultimately allows the visitor to feel that instead of being an observer of Africa, they actually became involved.