Ngorongoro Zoo
Our day began with meeting at 6am in downtown Arusha. We then raced across country on mostly empty roads, stopping only for bananas and French toast for breakfast.
After passing through the gate, with much lighter wallets, I began bouncing around in the back of the Landrover, sitting on the spare tyre, cushioned by a red shuka (Maasai blanket). It was the best position for scanning both the horizons for wild things.
After rising up through the tropical rainforest, dripping with mosses, beard like lichens and Pyrossia ferns, where the forest floor is tangled in an intense network of wildlife tracks, with the scents of spring blooms wafting readily into my dusty sinuses.
Up on the high plateau, the forest has dwindled out, the grazed grasslands are vast, we drove past emaciated Maasai, who rely only on cattle and the income derived from tourist photography. They are only allowed to use the land for grazing, hence no agriculture, so their diets are restricted somewhat. I was reminded of the girl in the red dress in the film Schindler’s List, at first visually, then emotionally.
We then dropped down the decent road, past massive Euphorbia trees, Candelabra and another funkier looking one. On the rocks beside the decent track we saw a large blue lizard with a bright orange head. We passed Acacias which had been completely smashed to bits and defoliated by elephants.
There were large herds of Maasai cattle, trailing across the landscape like a lazy procession of enormous ants. The land here is frequently burnt in sections, and now, as we anticipate the rains, this activity increases to encourage the germination of the grass seed. This type of landscape management allows the large populations of wildebeest and zebra to be sustained, which in turn sustains the big cats and hyenas….text book ecology in action.
On the crater floor we moved about and saw cheetah from a distance as well as a few rhino, we visited a massive flock of flamingos persisting on the small, mostly evaporated lake. While we watched, they took flight the motion was both fluid and cohesive, then they did it again and so I managed to capture it in movie format.
We then visited a gaggle of safari trucks watching about thirty hippos in their pond. We entertained ourselves by photographing the tourists while our guide caught up on the gossip from the others.
We traveled across the crater to a ‘safe’ lunch spot. I was eating lunch out of the back of the truck, only to have half of my sandwich taken by a swooping kite, it pushed off my head and arm to get back into the air, I felt like I was part of the place, being scavenged upon by a scavenger.
The afternoon was filled with watching, in anticipation, the commencement of a pride of lions stalking a zebra, then wildebeest. Dusk was falling and the clock was ticking so we decided to move on, only to come across a couple of very playful lion cubs.
We relieved ourselves at the last facility while elephants browsed the trees nearby. Climbing up the steep ascent track, as the light dropped further we quickly made our way back up though the scrub and forest to the $2000 per night hotel we passed as we continued the two hour drive home.
