Completing the Big Five in Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania

Day 27

Our safari group said goodbye to Serengeti National Park and Godlove retraced our steps back to Ngorongoro Crater. We headed straight to camp which was a beautiful grassy area right on the crater rim. When we arrived, there was a dazzle of zebras grazing in the tall grasses on the edge of the camp! We saw several tourists approach them to take selfies – Sara and Erin couldn’t resist either. After putting our belongings in the pre-pitched tents, we arranged happy hour with the senior truck and our guides. While everybody reminisced about the last 48 hours of epic-ness, I snuck away to climb the tree we were sitting under hoping to find a better sunset view. Instead, I found spider webs and everyone wondering why I was climbing the tree. The short climb was actually the most exercise I’ve had in the last week!

Day 28

Waking up at the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater felt like being on a cloud – more precisely, in a cloud. There could have been lions watching us as we walked to breakfast and we would never know because the fog was so thick. Unfortunately, my head also felt like a fog as I was feeling ill yet again (for the third time in a couple weeks). This wasn’t a good way to start out a full day of exploring the crater. I didn’t eat much for breakfast but Sara told me it was tasty. After breakfast Godlove didn’t waste time and we were headed down the steep road into the crater before sunrise. The Ngorongoro Crater contains over 25,000 large animals including 26 black rhinos so this was our best opportunity to spot one. (Our group had seen the “big five” except a rhino – we checked off elephants, buffalo and lions in South Luangwa, then cheetah in the Serengeti)

As we descended from the rim into the Ngorongoro Crater, we escaped the low clouds and were greeted with the expansive flat crater floor stretching out before us. I felt like I was in a fantasy world – there was a beautiful lake, expansive grasslands and a small forest in the distance, all surrounded by a steep crater walls rising into the clouds. The excitement didn’t stop there! Almost immediately after arriving in the crater floor, Godlove spotted a rhino grazing in the distance near the waters edge. I couldn’t believe our luck. The single rhino looked lonely as we watched herds of buffalo and antelope wander nearby. He was mostly laying in the short grass but did stand long enough for everyone to get a picture.

Godlove pulled us away from the rhino and drove us towards the forest until Nash spotted a huge male lion lying in the distance. While we stopped to watch, he got up, started walking our direction and let our several roars! Usually all our safari trucks stick together but the senior truck had already left – apparently they had seen enough lions from afar and wanted to keep moving. Our truck joked that they didn’t have any attention span and that the moment they got a picture, they took off looking for the next animal.

There was only one more animal that Sara really wanted to see in Africa – flamingos. Godlove promised that a lake in the crater is home to a huge flock of flamingoes. After winding our way through the forest and across the stark grasslands, we could see a sea of pink on the lakeshore. There were thousands of flamingos in the shallow water! Unfortunately, we couldn’t get too close because the road was pretty far from the lakeshore but it still satisfied Sara’s curiosity.

Godlove received a radio call and all of a sudden, we were kicking up dust flying down the dirt roads of the Ngorongoro Crater floor. We knew that there must be something exciting happening, but what? In the distance, we saw many of the safari trucks congregating and watching something. When we arrived, we could barely see that there were a pride of lions in the distance that seemed to have a kill but we still could not understand the excitement. Then we saw the senior truck who informed us that they actually saw the lions take down the buffalo! Guess their short attention span paid off! Sam could barely contain her excitement as she recounted how 15 lions worked together to get the buffalo then how they all seemed to play in excitement after their successful hunt.

Right next to the lion excitement was a pond of hippopotamuses which were also gaining the attention of all the safari trucks. There were about 20 hippos and several of them were fighting for territory in the pond. We had learned that male hippos wag their tail when defecating to spray on plants to mark their territory. Well, apparently they also do this when fighting face to face with another hippo. The end result was hippo feces being sprayed everywhere in the pond. Luckily we were far enough away to be safe from the spray but it still smelled horrible. Here is a short clip of the fighting:

After watching the hippos, we had to make our way out of the crater and drive back to Arusha to meet up with Jojo and Jimi (our Nomad truck) for our last leg up to Nairobi, Kenya. The truck was very quiet on the drive to Arusha because everybody was worn out from all the excitement the past couple days. Overall, we think the Tanzania Experience and our driver, Godlove, did a fantastic job on this excursion and it was a highlight of our month in Africa.