Exploring the Ngorongoro Crater

The Ngorongoro Crater is the world's largest inactive, intact, and unfilled volcanic caldera. It was formed when a large volcano exploded and collapsed in on itself two to three million years ago. It is 610 metres deep, 19 kilometres in diameter, and its floor covers 260 square kilometres. Estimates of the height of the original volcano range from 4,500 to 5,800 metres. The crater floor is 1,800 metres above sea level.

At the gate to the crater, we stopped for toilets and to pop the roof of the 4x4 so that we could get a better view. As we started our descent, we began to get some sense of the scale of it. It was still a little hazy, but we could make out the circular floor and Magadi, the salt water lake in the middle.

We stayed in the crater for about three hours. We saw so much wildlife. It was truly mind-blowing. We saw:

• Grant’s gazelles
• Elephants
• Lionesses
• Lots of zebra drinking at the point where Lake Magadi changes from salt to fresh water
• Oryx
• Impala
• Hundreds of wildebeest, including a couple of juvenile males who were butting heads
• Several beautiful crested cranes, the national bird of Uganda
• Hippos, both in and out of the water. Some of them had babies. (Hippos have a 243-day gestation period.)
• Warthogs, which were much paler than the ones we have seen before. Warthogs are called ‘pumba’ in Swahili, meaning ‘stupid’. The collective noun for them is ‘sounder’.
• A flamboyance of flamingos
• Thompson gazelles, identifiable by their big ears
• A jackal
• A spotted hyena
• Several glossy ibis
• A blacksmith lapwing, so-called because its call sounds like a blacksmith hammering on an anvil.
• A pair of kori bustard
• Secretary birds, whose diet is mainly made up of snakes. They kick them to death before eating them!
• A pair of ostriches
• A group of three veteran buffaloes, older males who can no longer keep up with the group. They stay together for safety.

At several places, there was a long queue of jeeps trying to see individual animals. In these cases, we didn’t wait. Mankinga took us somewhere else where we could see something equally good.Read more