Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater

The Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater are one of the most famous safari destinations in the world so I was looking forward to seeing the difference compared to the other safaris we have seen. We were collected by HQ Safari, Danny was our tour guide while William was our chef. We drove five hours passing through the Ngorongoro entrance before entering the Serengeti National Park. We stopped at the entrance of the Serengeti National Park to have lunch before starting our safari on the way to our camp for the night. The Serengeti National Park has huge savannah regions which are flat plains of grasslands. What surprised me the most was the amount of lions we saw on this game drive. We saw about fifty lions in total! In other game drives we were lucky to see one or two lions. Danny was very knowledgeable and he explained that 25% of African lions are located in the Serengeti National Park. We saw a female lioness perched up on a rock watching the savannah below, we saw two lions mating and a pride of lioness with their cubs. I learned that when a lion and lioness mate they leave their pride for 4-5 days and mate every 7-15 minutes before eventually hunting for food again and returning to their pride. A lioness is pregnant for three months with 2-6 cubs. Female cubs stay with the pride for life while male cubs stay in the pride for two years before they have to leave and make their own pride.

We also saw a leopard chilling out in a tree, a herd of elephants walking in a line in the distance, a serval cat walking along the road and two hyenas creeping through the grass. We stayed in a camp in the middle of the park and observed another beautiful African sunset before having a delicious dinner. I heard hyenas call during the middle of the night close to the camp but didn't dare leave my tent to invest further.

The following morning we had breakfast at 6am before exploring the Serengeti National Park further. We saw a huge amount of hippos bathing in the water, a very large group of buffalos, lions resting after killing a zebra, a variety of antelopes, warthogs running in random directions and two cheetah resting under a tree in the distance. Most of the animals were not bothered by the 4x4 vehicle apart from the buffalo who stared at us the whole time we observed them.

We exited the park and headed to a camp at the Ngorongoro Crater rim for the evening spotting giraffe and a buffalo on the roadside. The camp was so high it was at the edge of the clouds which meant it was pretty cold. We were glad to have soup for dinner and we wore multiple layers sleeping in the sleeping bags.

The following morning we drove into the Ngorongoro Crater. The Ngorongoro Volcano was last active two million years ago. The Ngorongoro Crater is the world's largest inactive, intact and unfilled volcanic caldera which means that wildlife can grow and live in this crater. The difference in elevation is 600m from the top of the crater rim to the crater floor. The vegetation was completely different inside the Ngorongoro Crater compared to the Serengeti National Park. The grass was greener, there is a lake in the middle of the crater and there were more bushes and trees around the edges. We spotted lions, zebra, warthogs, hippos and buffalo. We also saw two of the twenty eight black rhinos in the park. I actually liked the background scenery of the crater with some lakes and it was amazing to see so many animals in the middle of this crater.

After our game drive we drove out of the crater and headed back to Arusha. We heard that while we were in the Serengeti National Park Harmony, our driver, got a fever and had been taken to hospital. He was diagnosed with malaria and was put on a drip and given malaria medication. I was surprised to see him back at the truck ready to drive us to Nairobi the following morning but he said that malaria symptoms come on very quickly but they can also disappear quickly once treatment has started.Weiterlesen