Sunday, July 14
Ngorongoro Crater,Tanzania: Simba A Campsite
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On Sunday, we started our weeklong Tanzania Explorer trip with IntoAfrica. The trip was four days of safari following by two cultural tourism days at local villages. After climbing Kilimanjaro, we were all too happy to spend a few days just sitting in the back of a safari vehicle looking at animals. There were nine of us on this part of the trip: the five of us on the Kili trek and my mom plus Nico, a very fastidious German with a dry sense of humor; Gareth, a recent law school grad from England, with a very quick wit and an arsenal of inane, but funny, jokes; and Robert, a Canadian who had recently been living in Israel working on his Ph.D. in conflict resolution. The nine of us piled into two vehicles (a Landrover and a Toyota 4x4) along with our guides, Franclin and Dennis, and our two cooks, Elias and Eddico.
Our first stop was the Ngorongoro Crater, The crater is all that's left of a volcanic mountain that was bigger than Kilimanjaro. The caldera, one of the largest in the world, measures about 12 miles across, and is home to a vast number of species. We stop above the crater at an overlook; while it's beautiful, we have no idea how spectacular it will be once we descend inside. After dropping our gear at the campground so we can open the hatches on the top of the vehicles, we head down into the crater. We do one game drive in the afternoon and another the next morning. Not only is the number of species that we see very impressive, but the sheer number of animals is overwhelming. We see huge herds of wildebeest, which snort Xð constantly, as well as large herds of zebra and gazelle.
In the salt lake in the middle of the crater, there is a huge pink blur, which turns out to be a stand of thousands and thousands of flamingo. On the shore are a couple of big male lions lying in the sand. We see ostrich as big as VW beetles as well as hippos, elephant, and buffalo. We're even able to get a distant glimpse of one black rhino, which are very rare and are now endangered.
Click here to see more photos from the Ngorongoro Crater.
On our southern safari, we felt like we had the park to ourselves, and we had heard that the parks on the Northern Circuit are very crowded, but they really weren't too bad most of the time. Because all of the safari companies here have radios, everyone knows when someone has spotted a big cat, a kill, or something else exciting going on. It's not unusual to see up to 10 vehicles parked together around a lion, but the animals don't seem too bothered by the attention.
We camped above the crater at one of the designated campgrounds. Not a bad place to stay for a night, but nothing to get excited about. The site was fairly crowded with a number of overland truck tours. At age 61, my mother was camping for the first time. She had a tent to herself, and was a little nervous the first night or two. I sent Randy to zip her in, and make sure she was okay. By the end of the week, she was loving it. We slept soundly on the very comfortable foam rubber mattresses that the company had provided.
Click here for a map of the Northern Circuit Game Parks.
Click here for IntoAfrica's Tanzania Explorer Itinerary.