Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater

Bowl of Plenty - Tanzania's Magnificent Ngorongoro Crater

Words and photographs by Duncan Butchart

The dusty track wound its way up the steep slopes among vividly painted huts of timber and tin. Small girls in brightly coloured dresses skipped and danced on the roadside, while bare-chested boys ran in bunches after a plastic football. As we drove slowly past, chains of freshly washed clothes crept along flimsy fences like psychedelic pythons. We rumbled and bounced through this living tapestry of colour, beneath flat-topped acacia trees arching over the furrowed road. Up ahead, a bank of clouds loomed above the dense forests on the mountain top.

Up early, and on the road all day, our destination was the fabled Ngorongoro Crater and we were now halfway up its outer rim. Northern Tanzania is a breathtaking and dramatic landscape of ancient volcanoes, rift valley cliffs and vast grassy plains. Few places on Earth can match the wild splendour of it all. Although this is a land renowned for its great herds of game, it is also the home of the Maasai pastoralists who cling tenaciously to their traditions in the face of development. It is no wonder that so many travellers yearn to explore this remarkable part of the continent.

Back in the 1950s, Ngorongoro Crater was part of the Serengeti National Park, but a trade off between the government and the Maasai in 1959, led to the eastern portion in which the Crater is situated being excised (while the northern part was extended to the Kenyan border). Today the Crater falls within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a multi-use region where wildlife coexists with the Maasai and their herds of cattle and goats. To some, the NCA is seen as the blueprint for conservation in Africa, with the land, the wildlife and the people fully integrated.

The entrance gate to the NCA is set within the cloud-forest that rings the upper reaches of the Crater. Mist swirls around gigantic fig and pillarwood trees cloaked in moss and draped with lichens. We paused at the simple gate complex, then pushed on expectantly along the wet and slippery track . Glittering sunbirds sipped nectar from roadside flowers, francolin fluttered away from our Land Rover's wheels, and Bushbuck stepped lightly through the shadows. And then, as we swung around a bend and out onto a grassy bank, the huge inner bowl of the Crater was revealed. Nothing can prepare you for this enthralling vista of tranquillity and splendour. Rarely has the word ‘breathtaking' been more appropriate.

Dropping six hundred metres below, and spanning nearly twenty kilometres, the Crater is a collapsed volcano with a mirror-like lake in its centre. Depending upon the light, the lake shimmers like a pearl, sparkles like a pale ruby, or glows like molten bronze. The inner walls are blanketed in evergreen forest, and the floor is a patchwork of grasslands, acacia woodland and sinuous streams. From our vantage point, a scan with binoculars identified a group of Elephant ambling through tall grass, a herd of several hundred Buffalo wallowing in a marsh, and thousands of Lesser Flamingos crowded in the shallows of the lake.

To be up at sunrise on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater is sheer paradise. On most mornings, a puffy white quilt of cloud lies above the basin, providing an unreal quality to the landscape. And when the sun's rays emerge above the eastern rim, the quilt, and the whole magnificent scene, turns a thousand shades of amber. By midmorning the cloud cover has invariably burned off and the crater floor is bathed in sunlight. Nowhere in Africa are so many animals, of so many kinds, so easy to find and view.

A steep and hazardous track winds down the inner slope to the wildlife-packed floor where a network of sand roads snake through the grassland and around the lake. Although only fifteen or so Black Rhino remain in the Crater (there are less than 100 in the whole of Tanzania) there are few better places to view and photograph these highly endangered pachyderms. A number of huge Elephant bulls roam the crater floor and highlands, but breeding herds keep mostly out of sight in the dense forests. A multitude of grazing herbivores feed on the nutritious grasses in the crater, with Buffalo, Grant's Gazelle, Thomson's Gazelle, Wildebeest and Zebra the most numerous. With such an abundance of potential prey, it is not surprising that the crater supports a dense population of predators, particularly Lions and Spotted Hyenas. In addition to big mammals, the crater floor supports large numbers of grassland birds and waterfowl, but the most interesting species are found in the forests on the rim. Here, the observant birder may encounter Schalow's Turaco, Bar-tailed Trogon, Golden-winged Sunbird and Cinnamon-chested Bee-eater to name just a few.

Although the Crater is the natural heart of Ngorongoro, there are numerous other places of interest in the NCA. Olduvai Gorge lies in the ‘rain shadow' at the base of the extinct volcano's western slopes. The change in scenery and vegetation is astonishing, with arid scrubland dominating at this world famous archaeological site. It was here that fossils of the ancestors of modern man have been unearthed by the Leakey family and their colleagues, with the 1.7 million year old Australopithecus boisei having been found alongside Homo habilis and ancient relatives of giraffe, lion and hyena. A walk around this hallowed ground takes the open-minded traveller on a two-million year journey back in time, and is a not-to-be-forgotten experience. Not far from the gorge are the amazing ‘shifting sands' - a dune of volcanic ash which drifts across the plains, and it is here, too, that the immense herds of over 1.5 million Serengeti wildebeest congregate to give birth in March each year. Also of great interest are the Olmoti and Empakaai craters, the huge Nasera Rock, Gol Mountains and Lake Eyasi viewpoint.

Although declared a World Heritage Site, the future of Ngorongoro is by no means assured. It depends upon the pragmatic and sensitive management of tourism (which is set to increase once the new tar road from Arusha is completed in late 2004) and - even more crucially - the way in which the growing population of Maasai utilise their resources.

Ngorongoro Crater Lodge with its extraordinary architecture and atmosphere, comfortable game-viewing vehicles and outstanding guides offers an unsurpassed Ngorongoro experience.

Posted: Other by CC Africa, Date: 21 November 2006