Tourism activities in Ngorongoro Crater
Lake Magadi
Being in Ngorongoro crater, you will be exposed to Lake Magadi, a memorable place within the Ngorongoro Crater. Lake Magadi consists of shallow azure blue, fiercely alkaline from sodium carbonate. It is fringed by hundreds of long-legged pink flamingos. Smaller flamingos distinguished by their dark red bills, which eat blue-green spirulina algae. There are also many greater flamingos within the area with black-tipped pink bills, slightly bent to facilitate sifting shellfish from the rich bottom mud. The lake shrinks conspicuously in the dry season, leaving thick, crystalline salt pans used as licks by jackals, hyena and other animals to supplement their diet. Still, within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, there are many other regions well worth visiting during your trips in Tanzania.
Lerai Fever Tree Forest
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area contains The Lerai Fever Tree Forest with tall, slim yellow barked acacias forming an airy, lace-canopied wonderland of glades. These vegetation are much haunted by elephants, rhino, eland, bushbuck, hyrax, and hundreds of birds. This foliage is preferred food by rare, black rhinoceros. Old forests are regenerating slowly because of damage by elephants, which tear off whole branches rather than merely grazing. However, seedlings are spreading through the Gorigor Swamps. This is the home to hippopotamus and wading birds and favored drinking place of thousands of ungulates during the dry season. Fever Tree forest is currently forming new groves at the base of the Ngoitokitok Springs, home ground of the famous Tokitok arrogance of lions, film and television personalities in their own right.
Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli
Ngorongoro Conservation Area contains Lake Ndutu and Lake Masek. These lakes are on the migratory route in the Rift Valley. Mentioned lakes are not far from Olduvai Gorge where the ancestors of mankind began the journey towards evolution with the fabrication of the earliest tools and the building of the first human settlements. At Laetoli, hominid footprints of our genetic ancestors and their relatives have been found in alluvial rock of 3.7 million years old. No Tanzanian safari would be complete without a guided tour of the excavations and modest pale anthropological museum at Olduvai where you can also see evolutionary fossils.
Shifting Sands
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area contains Ash from Ol Dionyo which forms Shifting Sands – a black dune of moving sand hundred meters in length, and nine meters high, which ingeniously moves slowly across the plains at a rate of 15 meters every year.
Olmoti Crater and Empakaai Crater
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area contains the Olmoti Crater and Empakaai Crater. Your Ngorongoro safari with Global Vacanza will hold endless riveting possibilities. You will be exposed to two other nearby craters, Olmoti Crater which is shallow, grassy hollow, very quiet and lovely where Maasai graze their cattle alongside eland, bushbuck, reedbuck and an occasional buffalo. From the south wall of the caldera, the Munge stream forms a delightful waterfall, plunging several hundred meters into the Ngorongoro crater to feed Lake Magadi. Empakaai Crater is half-filled by an unusually deep soda -alkaline lake. From the rim, you can look across a frightening panorama of volcanic craters and depressions towards Ol Doinyo Legai, the Great African Rift Valley and even in super clear weather.
Gol Mountains
To the northeastern zone, the primeval Gol Mountains provide a surreal wilderness environment of stark, pink cliffs, enclosing the Angata Kiti pass, a bottleneck for the annual Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra, searching for mineral rich grasses as they return to their ancestral breeding grounds in southern Serengeti and the Ndutu wilderness.
Nasera Rock
Escalating 80 meters from the base of the Gol Mountains, monolithic Nasera Rock is home to mountaineering klipspringers, baboons and varied birds. It is also the location of a Stone Age human shelter, exhumed by the Leakeys.
Oldeani Mountain
Aligned to the southwest of Ngorongoro crater, bamboo-clad Oldeani Mountain feeds the stream that supports the Lerai Forest, whilst seasonal Lake Eyasi is a lodestone for archaeological and cultural safaris in Tanzania.
Hadzabe Tribe
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area embedded Lake Eyasi and other surrounding areas inherited by Hadzabe Bushmen who subsisted entirely from the wild. People of this tribe communicate by clicks and whistles. Mbulu and Datoga pastoral and farming tribes were ousted centuries ago from lands now occupied by the Maasai have now settled there.
Ol Doinyo Lengai & Lake Natron
While moving to the north-east as leading to Ngorongoro center near the border of Kenya, Ol Doinyo Lengai casts its conical gumshoe across the plains from the edge of the Great African Rift Valley escarpment. The name of the mountain “Ol Doinyo Lengai” in Maasai means “The Mountain of God”. This mountain is still active as it last erupted in 2007. Fearless adventurers may climb its lava-encrusted slopes to stare down into its main crater and be dangerously rewarded with sulfur fumes and occasional spurts of lava from smaller surrounding cones. It was featured in the Lara Croft film. Lake Natron far below, is fed by hot, mineral springs so heavily saturated with volcanic ash from Ol Doinyo Lengai that it provides a toxic, protective moat for Africa’s largest concentration of breeding lesser and greater flamingos. The lake itself shines like a jewel, sometimes green and blue with sometimes blooming red with cyanobacteria and algae which provide their food.
Accommodation
In Ngorongoro Conservation Area, most of the lodges are built high on the crater rim and afford amazing views over and into the crater as well as the perfect location to watch the infamous African sunset
