Ngorongoro crater - 21.sept

Today is the day to explore Ngorongoro crater and the conservation area, headed towards it at 7am. Conservation area covers 8288 square kilometers of volcanic highlands between the Great Rift Valley and the Serengeti Plains. As our guidebook knows to tell this place is a product of the volcanic upheavals that accompanied the formation of the Rift Valley and its varied habitats virtually guarantee sights of the "big five" animals of Africa -- lion, elephant, rhino, leopard and buffalo. I'm missing just rhino, all the rest I've seen.

For animals this place is a heaven, for tourists it's something close to heaven. At the center of this 600m deep and 19km in diameter crater there is Lake Magadi - it is shallow alkaline lake, home to so many flamingos that all you see is pink :) Besides the lake one can find swamp areas as well as grasslands, glades and forests.

They do promise to see rhino here, but we did not get that lucky. Instead we saw lots of lions once again, this time they were finding shade in the cars observing them, laying out on the road and not locking many cars to their positions without the ability to move because a tail of a baby lion would be directly under a tire :D Saw buffalo, tons of flamingos and other birds.

Just some 20 minutes before leaving we spotted a cheetah! It was doing its best to stay invisible in the tall grass between a flock of zebras, gnu's and impala. It was fascinating to see how the animals could sense or smell the dangerous predator and they all froze to their places with heads up. There were at least 100 animals standing alert and staring at a single spot in the grass, the air was dead still and felt like they were all holding their breath :) For a while we lost our cheetah but a while later found it again and kept observing it's quest. Cheetah is a very elegant animal, has a smaller head than leopard but looks just as good with it's spotted body. Apparently the hunt can take hours and we were running out of time so we did not get to see the chase unfortunately.

Once at the camp we got to witness how effective the tour guides can be when they are in a hurry - the tents were pulled down, packed, gear collected and car loaded in just about 10-15 minutes. So when they need they are able to move and organize themselves! Africa :)

For the afternoon we bargained another game drive instead of sitting at the camp for hours. We headed out of Ngorongoro and towards Lake Manyara. First dropped our things off at the same camp where we stayed the first night - Panorama Safari Camp located on top of a hill looking down at the lake, a beautiful place. Quickly unloaded the car at the camp and headed over to Lake Manyara National Park for a quick 2h game drive.

This park is famous for it's tree-climbing lions, seen resting up in the boughs of acacia trees. We did not see lions up in the trees, but we did see 3 cups playing by the stream. It was the cutest thing ever! Must have observed them for at least 20 minutes, everybody taking at least few hundred pictures of them :)

Watched the sunset in the park by hippo pools and headed back to the camp after 30 minute drive, arriving in the dark. Once out of the car I headed directly to the showers. I was covered in a thick layer of dust from head to toe, even my hair has changed color to this reddish brown hue of the dust, it is ridiculous. The showers are a joke here though - water was cold and it was barely dripping from the pipe so I basically washed myself under a tap. Oh well, it did the trick and I got most of the dust off.

Today was the most effective day yet, our time was well used and there wasn't whole lot of sitting around waiting around. It was good use of our costly time, I wish that every day would have been that productive on this safari trip.

Getting back at the camp we discovered that they had set us up in the luxury tents this time! There were actual elevated beds in them, tents were bigger and had a view directly to the lake down below - it was gorgeous!