Ngorongoro Crater

After Amboseli, it was time to head to Tanzania for a full day safari at Ngorongoro Crater. This was another long driving day, with about a 4 hour drive to the Tanzanian border, where I switched to a new Tanzanian driver, Casmus. 

The Tanzanian border experience was an interesting one, it was extremely disorganized and had separate lines for exiting Kenya and entering Tanzania. I didn’t realize this and only went to the first line and nobody said anything to me or checked my passport as we entered Tanzania. Luckily, as we started driving into the country, I looked at my passport and realized they didn’t give me a Tanzania stamp, so we turned around to get another stamp. Pretty sure it wouldn’t have been an issue until I was leaving Tanzania, but definitely would have made things awkward when it was time to leave and they realized I was there illegally haha. 

After the border fiasco, we had about another 4 hours to Ngorongoro. My new guide, Casmus was my kind of dude, he was this super talkative and hilarious guy and I don’t think we stopped talking the whole 4 hours. He also almost immediately asked me if I’d like to stop to pick up some beers, at which point I knew we would be the best of friends. Along the way, we also made a stop at a workshop that makes these enormous carvings from ebony wood. Normally, I hate these stops because you have all these people pressuring into buying something. To be clear, I have no problem with supporting the locals but I have just one backpack that is pretty much filled up and there is no way I’m going to lug some African souvenirs around the world with me for the next 9 months. However, this stop was really cool. I got to see some of the men who were creating these very ornate ebony towers out of the hardest wood in the world and honestly have no idea how it was even possible. They had a log of ebony there and gave me a hammer to hit it as hard as I could, it was like hitting a steel beam. Meanwhile, there is a guy over in the corner who is using a hammer and chisel to carve giraffes and lions into one of these logs.

We to our safari camp in the evening, I’d classify it as more of a hotel than an actual camp but it was very nice. Something else I noticed pretty much right away that held true pretty much the whole trip was that Tanzanians are extremely friendly and we’re always trying to teach me more Swahili, which was fun. Realistically I probably only retained about 10 phrases, but regardless of who I met they seemed to enjoy teaching the Mzungu their language. Mzungu is the Swahili term for a white person, I picked up on this one pretty quickly in Nairobi. I never knew what else people were saying, but if I heard Mzungu I knew they were talking about me 😂.

The next morning, Casmus and I set out for a full day at the Ngorongoro Crater. The Ngorongoro Crater is regarded by many as the 8th wonder of the natural world. It is a Crater that scientists think was formed millions of years ago when a volcano roughly the size of Kilamanjaro exploded and left this massive caldera that is now filled with wildlife. The Ngorongoro Crater has almost all the animals you typically find in Africa, with the exception of giraffes (due to the steep descent to get into the Crater and lack of trees they like to eat) and cheetahs (because of the large hyena population, which steal their food). 

We left for the park around 8 am and hit some of the densest fog I’ve ever seen as we were entering the park, which is apparently common. The fog cleared as we started descending into the park though which provided some amazing views of the huge Crater below. We spent about 6 hours driving around the park and saw lots of cape buffalo, hyenas, wildebeests, zebras, antelopes, lions (all we’re unfortunately way off in the distance and tough to see without binoculars), a couple elephants, hippos and some flocks of flamingos. There are also apparently some rhinos in the park, but they are very elusive and we did not get lucky and find them. Overall the scenery throughout the park was gorgeous though and much different from what I saw at Amboseli, with ridges bordering the entire park.