Day 6

Advanced Game Drive

We were up very early this morning, left our nice lodge and headed towards the Ngorongoro crate. The crater is home to an enormous number and variety of animals. They live on about 20 km of the crater floor. Most of them could leave the crater at any time but they have everything they need inside - so why bother?

In contrast to the jungle-like Lake Manyara National Park yesterday, the crater floor is more like a great grass plain. Only the crater walls in the far distance border the horizon.

Today clouds hung right on the upper edge of the crater. Imagine you are standing on the floor of a gigantic bowl and someone just put an enormous cloth over the bowl – a mind boggling view.

We started our game drive. After the warm-up yesterday we took it to the next level: Searching for the Black Rhino. The Black Rhinoceros is a very rare animal and the Ngorongoro Crater is one of the few places they live. In fact the Rhino population of the whole crater is 4 or 34, depending on whom you ask. The perfect challenge for our, now advanced, game viewing skills. According to scientific research (well, in fact we asked our guide Kachui, for his Rhino-spotting knowledge) we found out that our chances were 1:50 – not that bad!

At the crater’s gate nobody could tell us where or when the last Rhino was seen. So we just went down the crater. The breathtaking sight over the wide plain, the lake and the sun breaking through the clouds almost got us to forget our mission. Down on the crater floor we saw all kinds of animals: Elephants, Buffalo, Wildebeest, Zebra, Gazelle, even Lions – just to name a few. The only thing missing was, obviously, our Rhino.
Each safari car is equipped with a mobile radio over which the drivers exchange their spotting – but even with this technical assistance there was no Rhino to be found. After driving a round trip through the crater and watching a respectable amount of animals, we got to a place where “Rhinos sometimes hang around”, how Kachui put it. It was a place near the lake where a large number of Hippo, Wildebeest and others lazed around. We could only watch from a certain distance through our binoculars. So we tried to find out if there was a Rhino somewhere in the crowd. In the end we were still not sure but decided that something sort of Rhino-shaped was our Black Rhino. We finally declared our mission solved.

The Cradle of Mankind

Where are we coming from? Where are we going to?
At least the first question was comprehensively explained to us by Elinaza Mjema, the Conservator of Antiquity for the Olduvai Gorge. We stopped at this famous archaeological site coming from the crater and going to the Serengeti National Park. Elinaza explained to us how a gigantic rock helped mankind discover its roots. On this unique location water, weather and time eroded a whole mountain – and kindly left a gigantic block in the centre. This block clearly shows four visible layers of volcanic deposits – each formed over hundreds of thousands of years. A feast for all archaeologists. Just dig out some bones, sort them properly and voilá: The history of 2.6 million years of human evolution. To cap it all 45 km away at Laetoli 3.75 million year old human-like footprints where found. These two landmarks are world renowned and so the whole area was declared as the “Cradle of Mankind”. So this is where it all began; where we are from.

And where are we going to? Well, we were in fact going to the famous Serengeti Park, to the new luxurious five star Bilila Lodge, to be precise.