About this guide
Who's behind Visit Mahale?
Chimpanzees, a lake shore, and a permit myth worth clearing up.
Who writes this
This guide is written by someone who overlanded much of Africa in his own Land Cruiser with a rooftop tent, and for whom the national parks were what stayed. The information about them online was usually missing, wrong or years old: fees from three tariff sheets ago, camps that had closed, roads described by people who had never driven them.
So he started writing it down properly. This guide runs on the park authority's own tariff documents, on climate normals rather than brochure weather, and on what the camps tell us directly, with a date on every claim.
Why this site exists
An independent guide to Mahale, built from the official sources. Sites routinely quote chimpanzee permits of $150 to $250 for this park. No such permit exists.
How we verified the permit question
Park fees come from the gazetted TANAPA tariff document itself, not from copied operator pages, and every fees page shows when we last checked it. That matters more at Mahale than almost anywhere: much of what circulates online about permits, ferries and flights here is outdated or invented, down to TANAPA's own live tariff page containing errors that the gazetted PDF does not.
If nobody official has published a number, we say exactly that. Nobody has published a recent chimpanzee census, so we give the accepted range instead of a precise-sounding number. The trekking minimum age is not stated numerically by TANAPA, so we report the conflict between sources and tell you to confirm with your camp. Wildlife claims follow the published research record, which at Mahale is sixty years deep.
Found something outdated? Tell us and we will fix it.
Related guides
Mahale and Katavi are usually flown as a pair, and we cover both. Our other Tanzanian guides are Ruaha, Nyerere and Udzungwa, with more across southern and eastern Africa.