Arusha National Park

Where it sits. Arusha National Park is a compact park of roughly 550 km² about 25 km north-east of Arusha town, between the city and Kilimanjaro International Airport, and it packs three entirely different landscapes into a space you can cross in an afternoon. In the west stands Mount Meru, an active stratovolcano of 4,566 metres whose eastern flank collapsed in a prehistoric eruption, leaving a horseshoe crater open toward the sunrise and an ash cone on its floor. In the south-east lies the Ngurdoto Crater, a shallow forested caldera with a grass floor grazed by buffalo and warthog. In the north-east sit the Momella Lakes, a chain of shallow alkaline pools whose colours differ from one to the next according to their algae and mineral load. Kilimanjaro stands 60 km east and fills the horizon on clear mornings.

The story behind it. The Hungarian explorer Count Teleki passed through Momella in 1876. In 1907 the Trappe family arrived to farm cattle on the plains below Meru, and Margarete Trappe — the first woman to work as a professional hunter in East Africa — later gave a substantial part of the Momella estate toward a game reserve. That land became the core of a national park declared in 1960 under the name Ngurdoto Crater National Park, which then covered only the crater and its surroundings. Mount Meru was added after independence, and in 1967 the enlarged park was renamed for the nearby town.

On screen. Howard Hawks brought Paramount to northern Tanganyika at the turn of the 1960s to shoot Hatari! (1962), and the production worked out of this landscape for months. The film follows a company that catches live animals for zoos, and the capture sequences were staged for real on the plains with the cast in the vehicles: John Wayne as the boss, Hardy Krüger as the German driver, Elsa Martinelli as the photographer sent by a Swiss zoo, and a crew who collected genuine injuries along the way. The fictional outfit in the script is called the Momella Game Company, named directly for the estate the unit worked from, and radio traffic in the film is addressed to "Arusha Control". Henry Mancini wrote "Baby Elephant Walk" for the picture, and it outlived the film. Krüger bought a farm in the territory in 1960 and kept it for thirteen years; the property at the foot of Mount Meru trades to this day on the connection under the name Hatari Lodge, a few minutes from the Momella gate.

What you actually see today. Because there are no lions, this is one of very few Tanzanian parks where you can leave the vehicle. Ranger-led walking safaris cross the Momella grassland among giraffe, zebra, waterbuck and buffalo, and canoes are permitted on the Small Momella lake, which puts you at eye level with flamingos and a great deal of birdlife. The Ngurdoto rim road offers a series of viewpoints down into the crater — descending into it is not allowed — through montane forest where black-and-white colobus monkeys move through the canopy in troops, tails hanging like ropes. Blue monkeys, bushbuck and trogons occupy the same forest, and the fig-tree arch near the Ngurdoto gate is large enough to drive a vehicle through. The lakes hold no fish — the water is too alkaline — so the birdlife is entirely waders, ducks and flamingos, and the numbers shift week to week as the birds move between here, Momella's neighbours and the Rift Valley soda lakes.

Climbing Meru. The Meru trek takes three or four days from the Momella gate, with an armed ranger required throughout because the lower route passes through buffalo country. Huts at Miriakamba (2,514 metres) and Saddle (3,570 metres) break the ascent; the summit push follows the narrow rim of the horseshoe crater in the dark, with the ash cone dropping away on one side, to reach Socialist Peak at dawn with Kilimanjaro floating above the cloud to the east. It is a harder walk than the standard Kilimanjaro routes for its exposure and gradient, and it is widely used as acclimatisation before the bigger mountain.

Getting there and timing. The Momella gate is 45 minutes from Arusha and about half an hour from Kilimanjaro International Airport, which makes the park the obvious first or last day of a northern-circuit safari. June to October and December to February are dry; the long rains in April and May turn the forest tracks greasy but bring the clearest views of both mountains. Park fees are charged per 24 hours, walking safaris and canoe trips are arranged at the gate, and altitude on the Meru route is the main physical constraint.