Second Saturday in Tanzania

We are treated to a safari to end our time in Africa. Yesterday, we saw amazing landscape and animals in Tarangire National Park and today we travel to the Norongoro Crater. It is an immense enclosed area containing aunique ecosystem of animal and nature. Humans are visitors only here.

Serenget NP and Ngorongoro were a combined park in 1950. Soon after, they were split in two. Maasai we’re given this Conservation area to live and have their herds. I’m told they live side by side with the wild animals but only on the crater edges above.

It is an extinct volcano crater and is considered by some to be the cradle of civilization.

The first human footprints we’re discovered here. We drive into the park and it cradles us as we climb until we are above and within the rainforest as the Mountain roads climb to the sky . Soon, we have joined the clouds and now travel side by side with them.

Retired elephants cross from one side of crater to the other under massive trees of greeness with vines and moss blurring the tree outlines near the road. The leaves of those near the road are thick with dirt but just beyond in the vastness of the jungle rainforest, dense and deep they are untarnished.

The wind is brisk with clouds blowing through at eye level, mist in the jungle lushness lending it’s allure to the magnificence.

At the top, the crater expands before our eyes with the movement of the clouds sitting below in the scooped out valley . There are rumors of a rhino below and we race down to capture it if only in our imaginations.

As we descend, we leave the cloudy freshness and find the sun again. Its light on the leaves dancing with the shadows.

We switchback 600 metres down to the crater’s edge.

There is a large lake in the caldera and we are told it is a salt lake. Fresh water fed but with no outlet which allows the animals to drink from the edges.

Large craggy thorn trees thrive here with wo inch long thorns in between green fern leaves. I wonder who is hearty enough to dine there.

We see plump Zebras and Elan, Africa’s largest antelope, elephants, wildebeest and

40 rhinos who call the crater home…an underground spring and abundance of wildlife with water. Some call this secluded self contained valley the Garden of Eden. It is complete with the red fruit from the fig tree.

In the grassland by the waters edge, zebras, antelope, gazelle, coribastard, buffalo wildebeests, and hyenas graze and drink peacefully alongside each other. I would like to join them and live in the trees and have a vacation hut in the grassland.

I love the light and shadow on the hillsides, leaves and grasslands. It changes the landscape as it plays hide and seek with the wind. There is magnificent beauty in the contrasts.