Today we will leave our truck and take Land Rovers for our drive into Ngorongoro Crater. The Ngorongoro Crater is part of a large ecosystem that also includes Serengeti National Park. The crater itself is just part of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area which consist of an elevated range of volcanoes and calderas rising from the side of the Great Rift Valley. Ngorongoro Crater is, at about 20 km wide, one of the largest calderas (a collapsed volcano) in the world. Within its walls are a wide range of animals and vegetation.
After breakfast, we load into our Land Rovers and head off at 8 AM. By 9 AM we are at the rim of the crater and have a wonderful view down into it. We then head off to the checkpoint and begin our descent into the crater, reaching the crater floor at 10:15 AM. Once at the bottom, we stop so that we can open the top hatch of the land rover so that we can get some good views. While there, we see a number of the Masai herding their cattle.
As we begin our game drive, we look back and get a good view of the Masai and the crater walls. In the couple of hours before lunch we see a tremendous amount of game of all types. We start off we some African Buffalo (Cape species), Thomson's gazelle and then we come upon some ...
... lions. We first see one right next to the road that we are able to drive right up to.
We then drive over a small ridge and we see a whole pride of lions resting by a pool of water.
From there we head over to look at a number of ostriches. Heading off again, we went by the pride of lions lounging by the pond and went and saw the ...
... Cape Buffalo up a bit closer - they are not very handsome, are they. On our way to the Lake Magadi in the middle of the crater, we saw more Thomson's gazelle, cranes, warthogs, more lions, lots of birds, cape buffalo and Grant's gazelle.
Once we got to the lake in the middle of the crater, we had a great view of hundreds of pink flamingos wading in the shallows.
Upon heading away from the edge of the lake, we came upon three rhinoceros. They seemed to be trying to head towards the lake, and we were able to get some good up close looks at them.
As we continued to the lunch spot driving along the lake edge, we saw a number of things, including Thomson's gazelle, some cape buffalo walking along the water's edge, ...
... a mother warthog with her young, and ...
... some male lions in the far distance. We then got to the lunch spot shortly before 1 PM. We ate our sandwiches that we had prepared and then took it easy for a while. We were on the edge of a lake and we were able to watch hippo's wallowing in the water. In addition, there were dozens of kites in the tree that would fly around and try to steal your lunch right out of your hands. You had to be careful !!!
We then headed out after lunch to look for some more game. We had been talking with the guide earlier in the day on what we could see and not see in the crater. One of the things he said we would not see were any cheetah - so what was the first thing we saw? Three cheetah!!! We had all sorts of cars there with lots of people watching them. Even the guides were excited - it was the first time that they had seen them. It looked like they were trying to hunt down some wildebeest - or at least the wildebeest felt like it was being stalked. It would be looking around with frantic eyes and running here and there. We could only see the cheetahs when they stood up. Sometimes only one would stand up, or two or all three would get up. They might stick their head up to get a look around and then quickly drop back out of sight. We hung around for about 45 minutes watching them and then we decided to head on to look for some other game.
We drove around a hillock and came upon a herd of wildebeest and some zebras. After we had watched them for a while, a few storm clouds rolled in and it started to rain. At first it was quite heavy and we decided to drive on. As we drove along, however, the rain fall slowed down. As we drove along we saw some birds, including cranes, and then we came upon a group of ...
... six elephants. They were having a good feed.
We drove on for a while and found a couple more elephants - one of which looked like he had been around for a while.
On our way out of the crater we stopped for a quick pee and on the drive up to the crater rim we were lucky to have a great view of the crater.
That night we stayed at a camp site located on the rim of the crater - called Simba (or Lion) Camp. After setting up camp, it was our turn to help out with the cooking. We helped prepare roast pork in the oven, along with baked potatoes. After dinner, we took it easy and had a fairly early night. It was a great day of game watching in the crater.