Ngorongoro Crater

October 23, 1996

Here is the Ngorongoro crater as seen through streaming sunlight. The crater is volcanic and part of the Eastern Rift Valley system.

We camped at the top of the crater as the inner part is a conservation area. This means that even the local Masai who make their livings as herdpeople cannot live down on the crater floor now; instead, they herd their cattle down into the crater during the day and back out again at night.

Our guide was an excellent driver and successfully manouvered us into a herd of travelling wildebeest. This was nearly the end of the migratory season and so herds numbered in the hundreds instead of the thousands, but the sight was still impressive.

Hippos! Two hippo pools were full, with lions resting on a rocky outcrop nearby. Despite the cats, the hippos seem very related. There are five in the picture on the left!

We had hoped to see rhinos in the crater, but there was only a very far off sighting of a black blob which our guide believed to be a rhino but it really just looked like a black blob to everyone else.

In the shallow waters on the base of the crater there were a large number of flamingoes. Not as many as we saw at Lake Nakuru, but we were a bit closer to these ones.

		On our way out of the crater, we passed through a herd of zebra which were not as skittish as those we had encountered in Kenya. I snagged the closeup below as this one casually caught a snack.

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