Ngorongoro

Ngorongoro is a volcano that fell in on itself two and a half million years ago and left the largest unbroken caldera on Earth: a bowl nineteen kilometres across and six hundred metres deep, whose floor of two hundred and sixty square kilometres holds, at any hour, some twenty-five thousand large animals — wildebeest, zebra, buffalo, elephant bulls with the heaviest tusks in Africa, lion at the highest density anywhere, hyena, and thirty or so black rhino that are the reason many people come. Lake Magadi lies pink with flamingo in the middle; the Lerai forest of yellow fever trees stands in the south-west; the Ngoitokitok springs, where the picnics are eaten among hippo, in the east; and the rim, at two thousand three hundred metres and often in cloud, carries the lodges and the Maasai bomas, whose cattle still walk down to the salt. Around it the Ngorongoro Conservation Area — a UNESCO site since 1979 — spreads over eight thousand square kilometres: the craters of Empakaai and Olmoti to the north-east, the plains of Ndutu where the wildebeest calve from December to March, and Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakeys found Zinjanthropus in 1959 and where, at Laetoli, three hominids walked through wet ash three and a half million years ago and left their footprints.

The traveller comes from Arusha in three hours by Karatu, or down from the Serengeti, and sleeps on the rim — for the view at dawn, and because the descent by the Seneto road opens at six and the crater is best before the vehicles fill it: the morning on the floor with a guide who knows where the rhino were yesterday — the lake, the forest, the lions on the road, the hyena at their den —, the picnic at Ngoitokitok with the kites overhead, and the climb out by Lerai in the afternoon within the six hours the permit allows; the walk on the rim, or down into Empakaai for the flamingo lake, on the second day; Olduvai's museum and the gorge on the road west; and, in the season, Ndutu, where the plain is calves and the predators that follow them.

The Guide's honesty: the crater is not a secret — on a dry-season morning a hundred vehicles are on the floor, and the traveller who arrives at the gate at six and leaves the lions' road to the others sees the better crater; the fees are steep — the crater service fee per vehicle, the conservation fee per person, both paid in advance —, and the six-hour rule is enforced; the rim is cold and often wet, and a jacket is not optional; the Maasai in the conservation area live here and are not an exhibit; and the sight of the bowl at first light from the rim, with the lake catching the sun and the animals moving on the floor like a map, is one of the images of Africa, which is why the Guide holds this page as steadily as it does.