Our Blog - Safari 2023 - Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania

We passed through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area a couple of times, which sits between Arusha and the Serengeti National Park. This area, as opposed to the first 2 national parks that we visited (Arusha and Lake Manyara) is quite large, over 3,200 square miles.

Another interesting difference between this and some of the other National Parks is that the Ngorongoro Conservation Area allows the Maasai tribe to live within the area. This ended up being needed historically. When National Parks were being created starting around 1950, the local tribes (who were mostly shepherds) were forced out of the parks. To help correct this problem, the Conservation Area was created in 1959 and the Maasai tribes living in the Serengeti National Park were relocated to Ngorongoro. While you will see people herding goats, sheep, and cows, you won't see any farms as any cultivation above personal use is prohibited.

We stopped at the entry gate of the Conservation Area (where our guide needed to do some administrative paperwork) and as we waited, we got to watch a set of baboons. They were not at all afraid of people and were looking for food. We watched one of them climb up the side of one of the game-drive vehicles, inside through an open window, and head directly to the wicker baskets that all of the vehicles have in the back to hold snacks. You can see from the last picture how close one of them got!

We drove up to the top of the crater rim and stopped at a viewpoint to get a view of the crater, where we will be in a few days.

This is the highest elevation that we got to at the crater rim.

An interesting view, although it is difficult to see the giraffes that are over in the trees. Within the same Conservation area, you find very dry, arid flat savanna's (look at the set of pictures below this one) as well as areas like this one, with lots of green grass and trees.

We passed by this little hut with 2 large skull statues in the middle of a flat area, at the intersection with the road that heads to the Olduvai Gorge. Known as the "Cradle of Humankind" the site was where the very first known fossil remains of 2 contemporary bipedal hominin species were found. These are known commonly as "Nutcracker man" (on the left) and "Handy Man" (on the right). Nutcracker Man became extinct about 1.4 million years ago and the famous skull was found by Mary Leakey in 1959. The brain would have been about 1/3 of the size of modern man. The other, Handy Man, had a brain about 1/2 the size of modern man and it believed to be an ancestor of Homo Erectus.

Here you can see how volcanic the soil is ... since it contains all of the remnants that were blown out of the now-extinct volcano that forms the crater. But here you can see how flat the plain is, but also how it is rimmed by larger hills and mountains.

While we will see a Maasai village up-close later, we took a few pictures from the road as we drove through. You can see how the traditional Maasai huts are round with a thatched roof and the village will always have a small enclosure within the village where the animals are kept at night. Some villages, like the next picture down, the entire village is enclosed with poles or brush from Acacia trees (that have huge thorns). Note that these pictures were taken in 2 different parts of the conservation area ... the first one being early-on in the "green" area, and the second being in the dry savanna area.

We drove through the area on our way to the Ndutu region (which is I guess technically part of the Conservation Area). Not a huge number of animal pictures here, since we weren't necessarily doing a game drive. However, we did see a nice set of 3 giraffe that were fairly close to the car, and several groups of Thomson gazelles.

We saw quite a few of these birds, a Kori bustard. These are the largest flying bids native to Africa and the male kori bustard may be the heaviest living animal capable of flight. The male can have a wingspan up to 9 feet and can weight up to 40 lbs. And while they CAN fly, they spend up to 70% of their time on the ground, foraging in low bushes and trees for insects.

We saw quite a few ostrich but they were never that close to the car.

There were lots of different birds including these really nice bright blue birds, which I think are Hildebrandt's starlings. They are named for Johann Maria Hildebrandt, a German collector who was the first European to obtain specimens.

While we didn't see many heron's, every once in awhile, we would catch one at a distance.

We saw lots of the smaller Thomson's gazelle, the Grant's gazelle were a bit harder to locate.

You'll get a few more pictures from this area later on in the blog, as we will come back through the Conservation Area and the crater on our way back to the Airport.