Ngorongoro

After almost two weeks and about 25 to 30 hours of riding in safari vehicles between various stops, we got to our final destination of this vacation, Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater. Earlier in the trip, at Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya, we'd come across what the members of our party referred to as our first "Jurassic Park moment". On the way to our lodge the one night we stayed in that Park, we saw an open grassy plain with multiple species of animals moving in herds toward some unseen destination and it reminded us of the scene in the movie where Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler see the recreated dinosaurs for the first time. Ngorongoro blew away Lake Nakuru in Jurassic Park-ness. For me, Ngorongoro was Jurassic Park. Without the dinosaurs, of course.

The Crater, a 100 square mile circle which sits within the larger Ngorongoro Conservation Area, was formed between two and three million years ago when an active volcano exploded and then collapsed in on itself. It is the largest intact extinct volcanic caldera in the world, a site made most impressive to me because of its near perfectly level floor and rim elevations. It looks like a lush green bowl 2,000 feet deep stocked with wildlife that are for the most part captured within.

There is a road which leads roughly around the perimeter of the Crater offering glimpses to the floor below every so often. We first saw the entire Crater on a pitstop en route to the Serengeti National Park. I took the photograph above to memorialize the occasion. It is the most gorgeous national site I have ever seen (albeit with perhaps limited experience). I cannot think of a single place that filled me with more wonder, and that includes the Grand Canyon. Maybe it was the picture perfect day we had on our restroom and scenic view stop but I think this place is simply spectacular. It got more amazing when we descended into the place a couple of days later.

Wildebeest and zebra dotting the floor of Ngorongoro Crater.

To get down to the floor of the Crater, you have to take a twisty, turny, one-way road that seems not wide enough or stable enough at some points. Sit on the left side of the vehicle you are traveling in if you want the best, but sometimes breathtaking in a good and not-so-good way, view as you descend. The dark dots which are the wildebeest, lions, zebra, ostriches, gazelle and other animals get more defined as you get closer to the bottom. Maybe it was the day we visited but in my view the wildlife was more spread out than in the other places we had visited rather than gathered together in small or large groups. When you hit the bottom, you are faced with an almost flat landscape to explore before you take the similarly but different twisty, turny, one-way road out at the end of the day. The way out is the same road used by the elephants to get in and out. It might be a long drive if you have to wait behind a herd of elephants.

Over the two weeks in East Africa before Ngorongoro, we got the best look at cats in Masai Mara; the best look at rhinos at Lake Nakuru; the best elephant sightings at Amboseli; the most intimate extended experience with any animal (giraffe) at Lake Manyara; and a sense of what the great wildebeest migration might be like at the Serengeti National Park. Ngorongoro didn't top any of those individual experiences, but for me, Ngorongoro completed the entire safari. It filled in the little gaps that the other five parks together, for all the amazing sightings, missed. And where it duplicated an experience from another park, I was able to focus on the periphery of the event rather than the main attraction.

On the simplest of levels, Ngorongoro did two things: (1) it got us our best look at one of the animals that was on my top 10 never seen in the wild list (ostrich was number six on that list) and (2) it checked the last box for sure on my personal Big Five list. The picture above showing two male and two female ostriches is one of my favorite of the trip. I love the different poses, the spacing between the birds and the way some are looking right at the camera and others are not. We were close to the edge of the Crater at the time we saw these four so the wall of the collapsed caldera behind forms a back canvas to fill in the background of the shot. My only regret with ostriches on this trip is that we didn't get closer than maybe 100 feet or so but I'm glad Ngorongoro got me this picture.

The Big Five is a name traditionally given by big game hunters to describe the five species of African animals that are the most difficult to hunt on foot. They are not the largest five animals on the continent (sorry, hippo and giraffe). In our first trip to sub-Saharan Africa in 2015, we managed to lay eyes on the African elephant, lion and African buffalo but came home missing the last two spots. Earlier on this trip, we checked the leopard off that list in Masai Mara and Serengeti. That left only the black rhinoceros unseen. Our Kenyan guide, Joe, insisted that one of the rhinos we saw at Lake Nakuru was a black rhinoceros but it was so far away and disappeared so soon after we saw it that we didn't get any chance for a good look.

Ngorongoro fixed that. Black rhinos are scarcer than their white cousins that we saw at Nakuru. While there about 20,000 white rhinos in the wild, there are just 5,000 black rhinos. There can't be many of these animals in Ngorongoro but we were able to spot two and get a photograph or two of one of them. In marked contrast to the ostrich picture above, the photograph we managed to get of the fifth of the Big Five is not a spectacular picture because it was taken at a distance that stretched our camera's range. But we got him (or her). This was a big thing for us.

A solitary black rhinoceros. The last of the Big Five we saw on this trip.

Ngorongoro also gave us glimpses at the entire cycle of life. We saw what was probably the youngest animal we'd seen on our trip even before we'd finished the descent down into the Crater. On the right side of the road we were traveling down was a Grant's gazelle with its mother and it can't have been much more than an hour old and maybe that's on the high side of its age. It was so wobbly on its legs that the location where it was walking on a bit of a hill far away really from any other animals made sense from a keeping safe from predators standpoint.

That baby Grant's was not the only calf we saw. We also found a lot of baby wildebeest (February is birthing season for wildebeest) that we'd been hoping to see in all the parks we'd visited but which until Ngorongoro had largely avoided us. The wildebeest occupies a not so celebrated spot on the unofficial Ugly Five list (along with the lappet-faced vulture, warthog, marabou stork and striped hyena) for its less than pleasing appearance and is sometimes referred to as the "spare parts animal" because it seems to be made up of different not so attractive parts from other animals.

But the wildebeest babies? Well, not so ugly. In fact, they might be called cute. The beige coat looks way better than the grey-brown color the adults sport; the hunched back has not yet set in nor has the hair on the neck grown out; the awkward looking horns haven't shown up (I guess childbirth could be painful if the babies came with horns); and the tail works way better with the short hair. These things were plentiful at Ngorongoro, always sticking close to mom. Hopefully most of them survive until adulthood.

Mom and what was probably the youngest animal we saw on our trip trailing gingerly behind.

Baby and mom. Cute, right? 

Speaking of survival, we saw some death at Ngorongoro just like we did at Serengeti. And just like Serengeti, we didn't see the deed done but instead came upon the aftermath which involved a hyena and a whole lot of vultures. Our guide's opinion was that the African buffalo that was the object of all the attention here died from more natural causes rather than having been taken down by a single enterprising hyena. The idea of one hyena killing an animal as large as a buffalo didn't make sense, even if it could enlist the assistance of the two black-backed jackals hanging around the site to feed when they got the chance.

Since we'd seen a sight like this one just a couple of days earlier, I tried to focus on the behavior and flight of the vultures which kept descending and taking off again and again as the hyena chased them away. I think I'm fairly satisfied with the resulting photographs that get me a decent capture of these ugly birds in flight.

Vultures being chased from the kill site by the hyena...

and pouncing on the carcass after the hyena left the scene.

In between birth and death? A whole lot of conflict, right? Whether you are a human or any other sort of creature on this planet, conflict and fighting is inevitable. We'd seen a couple of zebra sparring at Lake Manyara earlier in the week before we got to Ngorongoro but that was at a good distance. Ngorongoro managed to get us some better looks at a spat or two.

I'm not sure if the Grant's gazelles (shown below) we saw locking horns right after we entered the Crater were fighting for real or just practicing, but the proximity to our car and the careful way they engaged one another was a sight to see. They almost seemed civilized in their fighting. I mean here's this animal with these sharp horns going at another member of his same species and instead of going right for the jugular, they keep the fight confined to their headgear only. Seems like a very gentlemanly way to go about establishing dominance over a fellow gazelle.

The hippos we saw tussling in the water later on that day? Not so gentlemanly. Ignoring the fact that these two animals appear to our human eyes to have huge smiles on their faces, the scratches on the skin and particularly the gash on the hippo on the right makes me think these big beasts are fighting in a little less friendly way than the Grant's gazelles. There were three or four pairs of hippos engaged in this same kind of display in the pool as we watched so I'm really not sure if this was a serious contest or just the start of something more serious to come. I believe either animal had the capability to do great harm to the other with those huge tusks in their mouths. Hippos continue for me to be the scariest African animal out there.

The almost civilized contest between two Grant's gazelle.

The less civilized hippo battle.

But after the best sightings of some species ever, the completion of my own personal Big Five list, birth, death and some fighting in between, I'll remember Ngorongoro as the closest I've ever come to an adult male lion and the way it made me feel.

Most of the animals in the parks we visited in our two weeks on continent are pretty immune to being concerned about the cars us tourists drive around in. Every so often, you'll hear about an elephant or rhino charging a car that got too close or a cheetah getting inside one of the open-topped cars that are everywhere (including both of the vehicles we used on this trip) but for the most part, the animals don't care about the humans. Unless you are an elephant, the cars are generally bigger than you and they never hurt you so the park residents just ignore them. Which sometimes allows us to get really really close to the wildlife.

After having seen most of what I've written about above, we came across a few vehicles stopped dead in the road. This sort of scene generally means something more exciting than a zebra or mongoose. In this case, there was a male and female adult lion slowly walking down the road in between lying down sessions. Since off roading in the Crater is prohibited, the only way to get this close to a lion is to find one right by the side of the road. This was an opportunity that we couldn't pass up.

We'd seen lots of cats on this trip and even found lions on the roads in other parks and followed them at a distance while they hunted (without results) but none of those lions was an adult male. This was going to be a different sort of lion encounter. Neither the male nor the lioness in this encounter seemed to show the slightest bit of interest in moving off the road although they did seem eager to walk around all the cars, including ours. And very very close.

In the two weeks we'd been on safari, we'd only twice been asked to close the windows in our car. Once due to the dust that was kicked up by our vehicle and other vehicles passing in the opposite direction and once when we were following a lion on a hunt and she (or he) decided to slow down a little. In Ngorongoro, the request came strongly and swiftly from our guide. The fact that our driver had already closed his window quickly made this request pretty real.

The male lion stopped on our right side near the back of our vehicle, closest to the seat I was sitting in. There were maybe three feet between my eyes and his and he was looking straight at me. I've never felt any real danger in a wheeled vehicle in a park in Africa (boats are a different story) including in the open-sided vehicles that we used in Botswana a couple of years ago, but I have to tell you I was wondering how high these animals could jump. Remember we are in a car with an open top. Yes the roof is popped up so it's not like there's a huge hole in the top of the car but there is about 18" or two feet of space that something can crawl through. Is that big enough for a lion to fit? I thought it might be for a lioness.

I will not soon forget those orange eyes looking into mine as if wondering what kind of a meal I would make. It honestly paralyzed me a bit despite the admittedly flimsy single pane of glass in between him and me to such a degree that I didn't take a picture of how close we were to each other. This is remarkable because all I'd been doing the entire trip was taking as many pictures I could of the animals. Now I get closer to the most feared cat on Earth and all I can do is stare back? What can I say, sometimes the moment takes over. I'll have to settle for the picture above taken by placing the camera part way out of the top of our safari vehicle. I didn't want to tempt the lion, after all.

Lions in Ngorongoro Crater. These ones stayed away from the car.

Shortly after our closeup lion encounter, we ate a late lunch out of the boxes of food we'd brought from the hotel that morning. We stayed in the car to eat because we'd been warned by our guide, Filbert, about eating outside with black-tailed kites hanging around. We'd actually seen what might happen to someone who was not sufficiently warned or ignored the warning (we weren't sure which) earlier in the week when one of these birds of prey had snatched some food along with a bit of finger from an unsuspecting tourist. 

That lunch was the last meal we'd eat in a park together on this trip. It wrapped a week in Tanzania with four fellow tourists and our Tanzanian guide, Filbert, and driver, Samson, after a week in Kenya with three of the four tourists and our Kenyan guide, Joe, and driver, Peter. We'd made it to the end and it was too soon at the same time. I couldn't have been happier with the company on this trip. There were no disagreements, everyone showed up on time each morning and we shared with each other. I think we were lucky and I was glad to have such compatible companions. Getting the wrong group could have been a disaster.

We came back to Africa this year to see elephants. We ended up getting something a lot different than we did the last time we visited the Dark Continent including not really getting the same quality sighting of elephants we got back in 2015. If we had done the exact same things we did last time it honestly wouldn't have been as good an experience. These two weeks in Kenya and Tanzania was the trip of a lifetime (so far) and certainly the signature trip of this five year long (for now) blog.

But as we ate our last lunch in Ngorongoro, we were treated to a family of elephants making their way slowly towards our stopped vehicle. It was a true family, complete with matriarch, dominant bull and mothers, juveniles and babies, including a couple of younger males involved in some fighting that was eventually stopped by the matriarch. Everyone in the car got out to watch despite the proximity to the herd and the very real possibility of being charged if the mood of one of the elephants turned (we left the doors open just in case we needed to flee). In the end, we got what we came back to Africa to see because of that last lunch. That show over a meal and indeed the whole two week adventure should tide us over for a while or at least for a couple of years. Then I'm sure we'll find our way back to Africa again. To resist would seem to be futile.

Six crazy kids and their guides. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania.

Lunchtime entertainment. The baboon eventually moved. Everything moves for elephants.