After breakfast, we left the lodge around 8 am in two separate vans, one driven by Leimu and one driven by Adam. In our car were myself and Jon, Julie and Marcus, and Jackie and Mike. We stopped along the way to pick up our lunches and to go to the grocery store, before travelling to the Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti National Park!
Ngorongoro Crater is a huge valley just south of the Serengeti. At the entrance to Ngorongoro there is a welcome center with information about the crater as well as the animals you can expect to see there. There is also a map of the area:
Here's a map of Tanzania (and a little of Kenya). We began in Nairobi (point A), then went to the Masai Mara (point B), then back to Nairobi before heading to the Ngorongoro Crater (point C) and then into the Serengeti (point D).
In addition, the area is FULL of baboons! They came right up to our cars and our drivers had to keep reminding us to close our windows and doors, otherwise they would get in the car and make it into a huge mess! At one point someone forgot to close one of our car doors and we saw baboons looking in and ran towards them to scare them away before they got inside!
After our stop at the welcome center, we started driving towards the Serengeti, stopping for a few minutes to look out over the crater.
On top of Ngorongoro Crater
We will be coming back to the crater in a few days time, after we head into the Serengeti.
Us in front of the sign for Serengeti National Park
The Serengeti (pronounced SY-rin-JET-ee by the locals, and which means "endless plains" in Swahili), is over 14,700 square kilometers big!! AKA absolutely ginormous. It was formed as a national park in 1951 in order to protect the wildlife there.
And we can certainly tell you - "endless plains" is a fitting name. There are times where you drive for miles seeing nothing but the vast plains all the way to the horizon. It is truly stunning.
After driving for another 2 hours (because already after just two days it's quite clear to see how much driving we're going to be doing here...), we arrived at our campsite for the night.
Our tents were already set up for us and dinner was waiting - vegetables, beef stew, rice, and salad - yum! The campsite is much nicer than I had anticipated, with toilets and showers, albeit cold ones. After dinner, we organized our things in our tent and headed to bed!
Jess' highlight of the day: stopping at the lookout over the Ngorongoro Crater
Jon's highlight of the day: seeing hyenas for the first time on the drive to our campsite
Jon's "lowlight" of the day: having a moth fly directly into his beer at dinner
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