Our Travels: Saturday, June 27: Ngorongoro Crater

We are staying at the Serena Lodge at the Ngorongoro Crater. It is one of a kind and we are loving it. The hotel is perched up on top of the crater, so we are at 7500 feet. It is a 2000 foot drop outside of our lodge to the bottom! The views from the balcony are spectacular. The entire lodge is very well decorated and looks like an African themed lodge. The rooms are well done but the best part was the added touch of heated water bottles/pads for each of us at night. They come during turn-down service and stick in these heated pads under our sheets. That’s a new perk we haven’t had before! It’s chilly here at night (down to the low 50s maybe upper 40s) so those come in real handy. Ours stayed warm almost until morning.

We had a very early departure (6am) to get out into the park while the animals were still very active. It took about 30 minutes to drive down into the crater and then we spent the entire day until 5pm driving around looking for animals. The crater has a few freshwater springs that flow into the middle. In the middle is a small and shallow lake. The crater is very large and we only covered about 25% of it, according to our guide. We got to see all the big animals we wanted to see. The only challenge were the rhinos which we only got to see from a great distance. The tour vans have to stay within the marked roads so we cannot get close to the animals if they are far away from those roads. The most common animals are the wildebeests, the gazelle and the zebra. There must be thousands of wildebeests. They were everywhere. It took a bit to get good shots of the elephants and the lions. There were several hippo watering holes where we got to see them up close. The hyenas were scattered around and some were too lazy to even move out of the way of the car! (we had to drive around one that wouldn’t move!) There are thousands of flamingos around the lake but there are no roads that get close enough to get a great shot – so you can only see the pink from a distance. We had packed breakfast and lunchboxes with us. This was the safari we were expecting. It’s a major step up from the Manyara drive and apparently this is nothing compared to the Serengeti drive we will do starting tomorrow.

We can give more details about this game drive later. I figure the best thing for the blog is to show some pictures since that’s all people likely want to see anyway. Plus, it’s late and we need to get up early for tomorrow’s drive to the Serengeti. Enjoy.