Ngorongoro Conservation Area

Second only to the Serengeti on the list of Tanzania’s most celebrated attractions, the Ngorongoro Crater is a collapsed volcanic caldera, 260 square kilometres in area, and surrounded by walls up to 600m high. Inside this incredible natural fortress exists a diverse range of African habitats – swampland, grassland, forest and plains – inhabited by all big five game species plus hundreds of their smaller counterparts. The ‘Living Ark’ of the crater floor is one of nature’s most wonderful spectacles, with bull elephants grazing knee-deep in yellow flowers as lions loll on the mud flats next to lakes of flamingoes. In the Lerai forest, troops of baboon chatter angrily at the lazy form of a leopard stretched along a yellow-bark acacia branch. Flocks of delicately coloured flamingos, heads between feet, dabble in the salty waters of Lake Magadi.

The Ngorongoro Conservation area includes both the crater itself and nearly five thousand square kilometres of dense rainforest, volcanic highlands and rolling plains. Its not a national park, rather a conservation area, acting not only as a nature reserve, but as an eco-system whose protection and management includes the welfare of the people who live there. Most of the traditional inhabitants of Ngorongoro are Masaai people, are perhaps the most well known of Tanzania’s tribes, a proud race of warrior pastoralists from the country’s northern region. They have long held fiercely onto their culture and traditions, refusing to allow their traditional way of life to be eroded by the modern world. Rather than cultivate crops and convert to a cash economy, they preferred to dedicate all their time and resources to their cattle, living off the blood and milk of their herds and moving constantly in search of fresh grazing.

The Maasai are partners in the management of the area, driving their cattle to the crater floor for water and salt during the day, and returning to their traditional homesteads in the surrounding area during the night. For visitors to Ngorongoro, opportunities to visit the Masaai and learn more about their culture abound. Manyattas are often opened to visitors, who pay a fee to take photographs and are encouraged to buy arts and crafts such as beadwork and leatherwork.

Also part of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area is Olduvai Gorge, the site of one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in history. It was here, in 1959 that Louis and Mary Leakey uncovered a 1.75 million year old jawbone which proved for the first time that homonids (the ancestors of mankind) had existed on earth for over a million years, evidence that our human race first evolved in Africa. Although the finds themselves have been removed to museums, there is an interesting site exhibit at Olduvai itself and the area is worth visiting to gain a sense of the ancient human history that has been etched into the soil of Africa. Less visited but no less beautiful, the jagged green hills that make up the Crater Highlands are a trekker’s paradise.