The Ngorongoro National Park - a crowning finale - 16.02

On our last real day in Africa, my absolute highlight was on the agenda. A safari through the Ngorongoro National Park was planned. None of us had done anything like this before and so we were all a bit excited. After breakfast, we drove to the park in two jeeps from the coffee farm, as two employees of the farm were going to drive us through the park.

After driving on more or less good roads, we finally reached the entrance to the park. There was a long line of other jeeps with tourists who also wanted to visit the park, so we had to wait a bit because when you visit the park you have to register and are checked again to make sure that you don't bring in or take out any prohibited items.

Finally, we were allowed to pass through the gate and a group of baboons were waiting for us directly behind it. The special thing about this park is that it is partly located in a huge volcanic crater with a diameter of around 19 km.

So we had to drive over the edge of the crater first. Looking back, this rather unspectacular first part of our trip turned out to be very exciting for us nonetheless. The first thing we saw after the group of baboons was a truck from a safari company that had broken down in the ditch, which of course strengthened our confidence in our driver's driving skills.

Since the other jeep had fallen behind, we stopped above a Masai village to wait for it. We were even able to take a photo of some Masai, but only after paying one dollar.

Eventually we reached the top of the crater rim and had a magnificent view into the crater from a vantage point. We tried to capture our view with photographs, but we realized that no camera could capture the intensity and shades of the greenery spreading out before us.

Then we started to drive down the crater. The first mammals we saw were antelopes and wildebeests, which were plentiful in this crater. We were lucky because there were really a lot of different animals that day. In addition to wildebeests and antelopes, there were lions, elephants, rhinos, water buffalo, hyenas, flamingos, ostriches, hippos, capybaras and a bunch of other birds (giraffes don't live in the crater).

Because the safari trucks were so crowded, the drivers jostled and behaved like toddlers, especially at attractions like lions, fighting for the best spot. We were told several times not to make any loud noises, but next to the elephants the drivers left their engines running as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Some people may be wondering how you can actually see so many animals from a car window, but most of the time you don't look through a car window, because the most important thing about a safari car is a roof that folds up, so that you can stand up in the car and watch the animals with a roof over your head and no windows in between.

This also has a few disadvantages, especially when the drivers drive fast over the dusty roads, you get all the dust in your face and it settles on your clothes.

Such a safari usually lasts several hours, so you'll have to go to the toilet and eat something at some point. Of course, this is provided for and there is a large toilet block and, 100 meters further along, there is also a rest area. Normally, you are not allowed to get out of your car, unless you find yourself at one of these two places, which of course are not fenced in. This led to several hippos bathing in a pool next to the picnic area, not five meters away from you, with no fence between them.

After several hours we finally drove back, exhausted. I was very impressed by the elephants in particular, but I must say that sometimes it felt like being in a zoo, as you were basically looking out into a huge enclosure from a viewing platform and the animals were only five metres away.

Another critical point is that hundreds of jeeps drive through this crater every day, creating a lot of noise and kicking up huge clouds of dust. When we finally got back to the park gate, we were glad that there was WiFi there, because we were able to check in for our flight and saw on the internet that it was actually flying despite the strikes.

In the late afternoon we reached the farm again and received some gifts from our exchange partners :).

Our last afternoon was really nice :D and we had a lot of fun again, but we also had to go to bed early because we had to leave early the next day to make our flight.