Ngorongoro is a World Heritage Site and the largest unbroken volcanic caldera in the world - 610 metres deep and 260 square km in area. Ngorongoro is not an impact crater. It was formed by the collapse of a volcano in the distant past, a volcano which may well have been as high as Mt. Kilimanjaro is today.

The image, taken with a Minolta Maxxum 9 camera, appears in Eleanore's archive at shuttercity.com. And it also can be found in the galleries section of wildfocus.com, a site based in South Africa devoted mainly to African nature images. Eleanore, who lives in Dallas, Texas, has travelled extensively in Africa. She tells us that lions do NOT like water and would not enter it despite the heat of the sun.

As I view the above image, I am reminded of an experience the Webmaster had in Africa. We travelled for seven weeks on the back of 5 ton Bedford truck on a overland expedition that started in Harare, Zimbabwe, and ended at Nairobi in Kenya. There were 16 passengers on our truck. Many hours were spent on the road each today and we would from time to time fall asleep even on the rough roads. One of the routines was that if someone needed a toilet stop, you would hit the buzzer and the driver would find a spot to pull off the road. On the particular day I refer to, a fellow traveller, Penny Jones from the U.K., was fast asleep in the passenger seat in the cab. The truck stopped and she woke up thinking it was a toilet stop. She opened the door, and was about to step out. But there, three or four feet away in the shade of a small tree, was a pair of the biggest lions you could ever imagine! I have never seen anyone shut a vehicle door so very quickly!