#6071 Hugging Trees (With a Dozen of Your Closest Friends) in Tanzania

Immortalized by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Le Petit Prince, the mighty baobab tree has filled the dreams of many a child in the years since the classic book’s publication. Often referred to as the “upside-down tree” because its nearly-always-bare branches resemble roots, the iconic gray-barked behemoth dots the savanna over a wide swath of the African continent. On the central Tanzanian plateau, villages often choose a particularly impressive baobab—or mbuyu as the tree is called here—as their market site, but when visitors comment on its girth, the inevitable reply comes. “You think this one is big? You should see the one in such-and-such village. It takes 30 (or 40 or 50) people to reach around it!” A specimen in South Africa has been measured at 150 feet around the base, but obviously it is a mere sapling compared to the mythical Tanzanian baobab.