Day 14: Ngorongoro to Arusha

It was another early start for our final day on safari. We met our guide at 05.45 for a quick cup of coffee, then were in the jeep and on our way by 06.00. We had a drive of approximately 30 minutes before we'd reach the road which would allow us to drive down into the Ngorongoro crater. The crater rim was covered in mist at this time of the morning, so it wasn't until we reached the crater floor that we started to get some views of the landscape.

Ngorongoro is the biggest volcanic caldera in the world, having been created when a large volcano erupted and collapsed in on itself over 2 million years ago.

We've been inside a caldera before - when we visited Corvo in September 2022 - but Ngorongoro is many times bigger.

The crater floor covers an area of approximately 100 square miles. It's absolutely huge!

The first part of the crater floor which we arrived at was quite wooded.

Almost immediately we came across a group of baboons in the trees.

It was fun watching them play and climb trees. We spotted a mother carrying a baby on her back.

The next animals which we found were zebras.

We hadn't seen any zebras for a couple of days, because they don't live in the Serengeti during the dry season. Together with the wildebeest they are in a constant migration, currently moving north towards Kenya where there are more rains and grass at this time of year.

In Ngorongoro, however, there is sufficient grass all year round and so the zebras and wildebeest are able to stay put.

I was particularly excited to see this baby one

The one animal which we wouldn't be seeing in Ngorongoro was giraffes; the sides of the crater are too steep for them to climb in and out. But we had a good chance of seeing almost everything else, and we soon encountered a group of buffalo.

As we drove round a corner we were about to see a spectacular sight: the huge herds of zebra and wildebeest which live within the crater.

There were so many of them!

We were even treated to a few wildebeest running across the road in front of us.

We made our way towards Lake Magadi, a large salt-water lake in the middle of the crater.

I was particularly excited to see flamingos here, given that there hadn't been any in Lake Manyara.

Not far from the lake we also saw a couple of grey crowned cranes. These are the national bird of Uganda.

We were heading towards a second, much smaller freshwater lake, by which there is a picnic site where we were planning to eat breakfast.

While our guide was sorting out the food, we walked down towards the lake. There was a sign warning us not to go too far.

We soon realised why: there were hippos in the lake!

Wow, never thought we'd be having breakfast overlooking a pool of hippos!

It was a really scenic spot to sit and eat.

And the hippos really were quite a long way away and unlikely to leave the pool until evening.

We were observed by a couple of colourful birds as we finished our breakfast.

Then we were on our way again, progressing around the crater floor.

We found an ostrich...

...and a group of hyenas.

In fact, we then saw one of the hyenas walking among a group of gazelles. Hyenas don't normally hunt their own food, preferring to steal food from other animals instead, but the gazelles were still very wary.

We drove up to the top of a small hill within the crater. From here we could see that a row of jeeps had stopped on the road below the hill to observe something.

It seemed to be a group of lions.

Our guide drove us back down the hill and we established that it was a pair of male lions. A coalition of lions, as it's officially called when lions pair up with each other.

They were fun to observe.

They did, however, end up causing quite a blockage of traffic on the road.

One of the pair walked right past us, which was really cool.

Then he decided he'd had enough excitement for one day and lay down by the side of the road to go to sleep.

A little bit further on, a pride of lions were relaxing beside a small pool.

There were lots of them here, including several cubs.

As we drove round past the main lake again, we were able to see not only flamingos but also more hippos.

The day had cleared up now and we were getting better views of the crater walls.

We'd seen so much in the crater but there was one animal we were still on the look-out for, and it was the one we needed to find to have successfully seen all of the so-called "Big 5" while on safari. We'd already seen plenty of elephants, lions and buffalo and we'd just about seen two leopards in a tree while in the Serengeti, so the only animal missing from our collection was a rhino.

Rhinos are an endangered species and there are estimated to be only 20 - 30 of them within the Ngorongoro crater. Not a very good picture below because we were quite a distance away, but amazingly our guide managed to track one down about half an hour before we needed to leave the crater!

With that, we could regard our safari as complete. We started the long drive up out of the crater.

The weather was really bright and sunny now. As we drove back along the main road which would ultimately take us towards Arusha, we stopped at the main crater viewpoint where it had been too cloudy for us to see anything at all a couple of days ago.