Ngorongoro Crater

To drive from Lake Manyara to Ngorongoro you enter the great rift valley. I always find it interesting to suddenly be presented with the things and places that you studied in school but thought were were so far away that they may as well not exist. Once up in the valley the landscape was green with rolling hills, filled with farms and temperate forests so that it could almost have been Europe.

The Ngorongoro Crater is actually the collapsed caldera of an old volcano, and there is still an active volcano on the rim. From the rim to the crater floor is almost 700 meters, and the crater is just under 20 kilometers across at its widest point, it's the largest unbroken caldera in the world. I'm sure everyone is very interested in all this, but it falls under the vast category of safari information that Eric knows, and I wouldn't want it to go to waste. Perhaps a better way to describe the crater is that it is epic. It's the kind of thing that you look at in disbelief for several minutes then try to take a picture of it only to find that it simply wont fit in a picture.

Immediately on our decent into the crater we found ourselves in what seemed like the Lion King come to life. There were vast herds of animals all mixed together; zebra's, wildebeests, impala's and antelopes of various kinds. Unlike the few zebra's we saw yesterday these were up close and not really that worried about us. There were baby zebra's following their mothers and zebras rolling in the dirt, and many of the zebras were pregnant as well.

In among the herds we saw several hyenas sleeping and some trying to hunt, and there were even a few little jackals wondering around looking for something to scavenge. As we drove toward the far side of the crater we saw several ostrich's in a group and off in some bushes to our right were a couple of lions. They were too far away to get a good look at, one we could only see the face of through the bush, and only with binoculars. They must not have been hungry just then.

There were elephants in the crater as well, but not in herds. we saw several standing by themselves, and in some way they were more impressive than the one's we saw up close yesterday. "These were full grown bull elephants," Eric told us, "they don't live with the herd except for the mating season." There was something incredibly impressive about these elephants, the way the almost casually strolled along the vast openness of the crater floor. They, more than anything else we saw, matched the grander of the Ngorongoro.

After lunch we saw another lion, a male with a huge mane, laying by the side of the road. Because of the high grass we couldn't really see his face, but he was so close I could hear him breath. We watched for a while, hoping he would sit up, and eventually he did, but he turned to face the other direction. We have lots of pictures of the back of his head. Soon after he walked directly away from us, again not showing his face to us. It was almost like he was playing with us.

Eric, our drive, was excellent the whole time. As we would be driving along, bumping down the dirt roads, he would be watching out for animals. Every so often he would stop the car and stare off into the distance. We would look in the same direction but not see anything. Then Eric would look through binoculars and either point out some animal the rest of us had completely missed or drive on. Once he spotted a rhino and her baby from so far away that even with the binoculars we could only just make out the horn on the mother. Eric knew about all the animals, when they come out, what they eat, how many rhino's are in the crater (23), and when volcano on the rim last erupted (the day before).

So far I had come to believe that this safari was one of the most incredible things I had ever seen, and I still do. It sounds cool, to see all these animals in the wild, but you really cant imagine what it is like until you see it first hand. The power of an elephant just does not come across in a picture or on the discovery channel.