After a couple of days mostly resting in Moshi and Arusha because of a stomach bug, we went up to Ngorogoro Crater. Anyone interested can get the basic facts about the Crater here, but basically it was formed a few million years ago after a volcano exploded. The original mountain was probably higher than Kilimanjaro, which is cool. After the lava and ash and everything blew up the mountain collapsed in on itself and that formed the crater. The walls are about 600m high and really steep both on the inside and outside, as you can see from the GPS view below. We camped up on the crater rim along with a ton of other people, but I think we were the only independent travellers there. Which meant we had to cook our own dinner and wash our own dishes while everybody else had their guides and other people to do that. It was really cold at night.
The next morning we got up before sunrise so that we could get into the crater early. Turns out we were actually the second car that morning to reach the crater floor. Like a boss.
There are tons of animals in the crater. We saw huge numbers of wildebeest, zebra, gazelles, buffalo and flamingos, but the really amazing thing was all the predators. I think we personally saw about 10% of the spotted hyena population in the whole park - we must have seen close to 30. And several lions, and jackal, and even a serval, which is like a small leopard. They all looked pretty well-fed with all those prey within easy reach. At least when we got out of the car at the picnic points I was not worried about becoming anybody's lunch!
There are tons of animals in the crater. We saw huge numbers of wildebeest, zebra, gazelles, buffalo and flamingos, but the really amazing thing was all the predators. I think we personally saw about 10% of the spotted hyena population in the whole park - we must have seen close to 30. And several lions, and jackal, and even a serval, which is like a small leopard. They all looked pretty well-fed with all those prey within easy reach. At least when we got out of the car at the picnic points I was not worried about becoming anybody's lunch!