Ngorongoro Crater

The Ngorongoro Crater on the way in.

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For some reason we were all up extremely early this morning!

Our driver, Zacari, was determined that we would see the 'big five' animals before we left the Serengeti / Ngorongoro Crater area and we drove around till around 8.00am looking for stuff.

The big five are the animals that people used to come and hunt and include lion, buffalo, rhino, elephant and leopard. We saw the first three in the Serengeti and then headed off to the crater.

The Ngorongoro Crater is part of the overall national park but a discrete area in its own right. It was created by volcanic action and is the largest intact volcanic caldera in the world. Basically it's a very big bowl and driving down from the top it looks very impressive and fairly barrren. There's a lake at the bottom which is strongly alkaline and covered in pink flamingo  and as you descend the 610m, you start to get a real sense of what is going on.

The alkaline lake at the bottom of the crater covered in pink flamingo

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Zacari, our guide was a brilliant spotter and on the way down pointed out a herd of wilderbeast migrating across the plains near the lake. Turned out to be piles of earth for some track repairs but you could see why he got it wrong. And since that was the only thing he got wrong throughout the trip, we let him off.

We saw a couple of Cheetah by the lake. If they'd had a windbreak and deckchairs, you'd have sworn they were on their summer holidays.

We saw black rhino, warthogs (including one doing the fantastic victory spin), elephant, lions, jackal, hyena and some quite stonking birds that shall remain nameless.

By the end of the day we'd done the big five (we saw a leopard in a tree just before we descended into the crater). In fact, we decided we'd done the big eighteen as we could never remember what the big five were and kept extending the list.

The local puss.

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My favourite? Difficult to say. The warthogs are really cool and funny. The rhino are magnificent. The hippos are really scary even when buried in the water and the elephants just magnificent out on the plain. But I think the wilderbeast have it when they are running. It's just an awe inspiring sight to see so many animals running across the plain. Daft buggers!