Ngorongoro Crater

We are staying in the Karatu Safari Camp Lodge in the bustling town of Karatu. The town is the largest settlement (20,000 people) between Arusha and the Serengeti and is 1,500m, close to a mile up, in altitude. A lot of tourist necessities can be found here - ATMs, grocery stores, hotels, gift shops, etc. It is a good place to use as a home base for seeing several interesting places so we are staying here for 3 nights.

Our destination for today is down into the Ngorongoro crater - the world’s largest intact volcanic caldera. The wall is not broken anywhere. We actually passed it earlier on the way to the Serengeti. The floor of the crater (600m below the rim) is 260 square kilometers with a large lake in it.

The road leading to the bottom is steep and cobblestoned and there are several switchbacks.
The scenery and seeing large concentrations of wildlife was great. It is an excellent location to view the Big Five - elephants, lions and buffaloes, sometimes leopards and black rhinos. We have seen 4/5 of the Big Five and today we saw #5 - the Black Rhino! He was in the tall grass and we really couldn’t take a clear cellphone photo of him but we did see it.

Lake Magali was full of all sorts of water birds and hippos. Open grassland covers most of the crater floor and is full of zebras, hyenas, warthogs, wildebeest, gazelle, elephants with big tusks and buffalos. There weren’t any impala or giraffes though.

The birding was great. All manner of water birds - storks, ducks, cranes, herons, flamingoes, pelicans and many, many more. On the grasslands we saw Kori bustards (world’s heaviest flying bird), ostriches, crowned cranes and a long-crested eagle. I’m naming just a few of the many kinds of birds that we saw that live in this area.

Tourists have to follow strict rules. It opened at 7 a.m. and it closed at 6 pm. The picnic and washrooms are the only areas you can get out of the vehicle you are in. We read that is costs $250 U.S. plus tax per vehicle to enter the crater. Yeah I just I just read that. It cost $250 plus tax US per vehicle to enter that crater 250 bucks.

The highlight of our visit happened at the end of our visit in a swampy area that was loaded with waterfowl.Read more