Tanzania, Ngorongoro Crater National Park

We left the Serengeti and did the drive to the Ngorongoro crater national park for our last game drive of our safari. The extinct volcano crater that makes up the area has a twisty road up and down that gives you some nice views of the wide open space of the park.

The crater is mostly grasslands with almost no trees giving you a long view, but it also shows you how the natural camouflage works on the animals when they are in the grass.

Part of the crater is the marshy area that is filled with birds of all types and wildebeest come to get water. The pink flamingos are everywhere. We stopped to watch them.

We moved back to the grasslands and spotted a cheetah. Unfortunately it was walking away from us and back into the grass. We didn't get to see it for very long.

Vultures, jackals, and more warthogs were spotted on the drive to the lunch area. We had our lunch in an area near water where hippos were swimming. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to learn why hippos are not cute creatures in real life.

After lunch we continued the drive and spotted the one remaining creature on our Big Five list (Lion, Elephant, Buffalo, Rhino, Leopard) the Black Rhino. I'm not quite sure how Mashoka spotted them but they were lounging at quite a distance from the trail (see if you can find them in the thumbnails below, they were even smaller in real life).

After we snapped the pictures of the rhino we continued our search for more creatures. We found a lion sitting in the grass and assume that it had just been hunting due to the panting. A hyena was circling around the lion, but stayed its distance downwind. Hyenas are rather peculiar in the way they run. They do not look like dogs, but more like small giraffe. Their necks are long and they don't really bend, resulting in their gate to be more of a trot with bouncing head. It looks almost unnatural when you watch.

We stayed and waited for a bit to see if anything would happen between the hyena and the lion. The hyena was smart enough to stay away. Moving on from the lion we had a spectacular finish to our safari. We came across six female lions who had just been involved in a fight (see the wounds in the pictures below).

The cats were incredible and seeing so many all at once was unique. We thought that there were only three, and then more came into view. At one point one of the lions decided the shade of the parked truck was a better choice to sit then the grassland area. We ended up having to carefully move the truck so as not to run over the exhausted lion!

We stayed in the Serena lodge that night, sharing our last beer with Mashoka and looking at our pictures. We had to pack up everything for the three hour drive to Arusha in the morning and the flight to Zanzibar in the afternoon.

The next afternoon we wished Mashoka farewell and hope to see him again at some point, as this was a wonderful "lazy safari" through Tanzania.

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Ngorongoro Crater National Park	Ngorongoro Crater National Park	Ngorongoro Crater National Park	Ngorongoro Crater National Park	Ngorongoro Crater National Park
Ngorongoro Crater National Park	Ngorongoro Crater National Park	Ngorongoro Crater National Park	Ngorongoro Crater National Park	Ngorongoro Crater National Park
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Ngorongoro Crater National Park