Ngorongoro

The Ngonrongo conservation area is just as huge as the Serengeti and it includes Olduvai Gorge where the remains and traces of the earliest know humans were found. We stopped there on the way to the Serengeti and had lunch with those remains. It also includes the magnificent Ngorongoro crater.
We camped first on the crater rim and because of the high altitude it was quite cold. Who knew that we’d be cold in Africa in the summer! Wachira made us a campfire which made us popular on the site. Kaye and Torvul came over and a whole group of travelers who are on a 7 week overland tour from Kenya to Cape Town. They’d just started three days earlier and were still getting to know each other. We laughed quite a lot.
The big drama that night were the two zebras doing laps around the campsite and having a fight, presumably we thought over the 5 females who were paying no mind and grazing in the bush. Then we were visited by two water buffalo. That created quite a stir especially when I went to the toilet and found a water buffalo blocking the way. I figured that generally animals mind their own business if you leave them alone so I made a big B-line around the water buffalo. The security guards weren’t very happy with me. Mind you I didn’t like how they shone their flashlight in its eyes, startling it. But nothing happened. The security guards shooed it away by throwing rocks at it. And it kept coming back, bringing its friend with him. So that provided much conversation. I was heralded both for my bravery and my stupidity.


The actual crater visit was amazing. It was like entering into another land, another time another space. It’s a comparatively small area with a large concentration of animals. It was a living Grade 4 Habitats diorama project. We saw all the animals we’d seen on the Seregenti but added to this were the lake full of flamingos and the black rhino. We saw him from a distance with binoculars but we still saw him. They’re very rare. The coolest was the cheetah. He/She was sitting fairly close to the road in the grass. There were some gazelles not too far off and we were hoping that perhaps he was hungry. But there was also a hyena in the vicinity. They’re natural enemies. Hyenas will come in and scoop the cheetah’s kill. So there was a bit of tension between the two. I suppose the hyena was waiting for the cheetah to go over the gazelles as well. But the cheetah wasn’t falling for it. You could see its muscles tensen and him be quite annoyed about the hyena. He ended up walking away, still often looking back, but he passed right by our car as he crossed the road. Very beautiful cat. Oh and we saw a mama lion with her three cubs lying about in a ditch area. They were hard to see. We had to lean far out the roof top window but it was very cute as she sometimes licked them and they played about or suckled for milk. The amount of cameras we saw with huge telephotographic lenses made us laugh and shake our heads.



There was something Jurassic Park about the crater, in some areas anyway, near the end where we saw the elephants in particular. We had our lunch out there at a picnic area. As I was eating my sandwich, the last of Juma’s homemade buns with cheese and tomato, a big black kite (bird of prey) swooped down and snatched the sandwich out of my hand. It’s large wings almost smacking me in the head. We ate the rest of our lunches huddled by the side of the big white truck to avoid any other loss of meals.

It felt very strange driving out of the crater. We were leaving the beautiful, misty, magical atmosphere and were lurched back into reality.

The animals in Africa are beautiful.

The list of animals I saw:

-vervet monkey
-blue monkey
-black monkey
-baboon
-jackals
-bat-eared fox
-spotted hyena
-lion
-cheetah
-african elephant
-rock hyrax
-burchell’s zebra
-black rhinoceros
-warthog
-hippopotamus
-giraffe
-bushbuck,reedbuck,waterbuck
-eland
-african buffalo
-antelope
-wildebeest
-hartebeest
-dik-dik
-impala
-Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelles
-leopard tortoise (we saved one from getting run over on the road)