Tanzania, December 2006

The next morning we took the paved road to its end, the gate of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. We stopped on the crater rim for a view across the nearly flat floor, with clouds swirling overhead and even in the crater. Even from the distant rim we could see herds of animals at the bottom.

Once we drove down into the crater, we were viewing animals more or less continuously until we left hours later. The one animal we saw in the crater and nowhere else was the black rhino. Altogether we saw 10 of them - many after our guide would stop driving (on a rough track), put binoculars to his eyes to confirm what he had seen out of the corner of his eye, and then point out a rhino lying grazing 500 yards off, or a pair lying deep in the grass.

After the exciting (i.e. steep and narrow, with long dropoffs only feet away) drive out of the crater, we headed on to Ndutu, at the western edge of the Conservation Area on the border with Serengeti National Park. We passed through hills and saw huge numbers of giraffes. The hills gave way to green flat plains populated, at least temporarily, by a lot of animals passing through on their annual migration, driven by the search for water and grass - most, but not all, of them alive.

We spotted a freshly killed wildebeest only a few hundred yards off the dirt road we were crossing. We stopped and watched the group of hyenas who had made the kill gorging themselves while a growing crowd of vultures and other scavenger birds watched and waited their turn. One hyena overdid it and staggered away from the wildebeest, throwing up several times - which the birds pounced on immediately. Finally the hyenas backed off and a dozen birds jumped at their chance to stick their entire head and neck into the carcass, only to be chased away again a short time later by some more hyenas. We watched all that play out from probably 20 yards away, surrounded in every direction as far as we could see by green plains covered with scattered wildebeest, zebras, and gazelles while spectacular clouds lit by the late afternoon sun filled the sky. That was the Serengeti we had come to see - wild, scenic, maybe vicious, and completely unlike anything we had experienced before.

For the next two nights we stayed at the Ndutu Safari Lodge, near the border of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Serengeti National Park. We checked in just after a family with two small children, who were warned not to let their kids walk around alone, because "there are animals." And there were: we couldn't go from our cabin to the dining room without stumbling over and being surrounded by rabbits and colorful birds, and a few hundred yards away, with no fence between, we could see herds of zebras and wildebeest and the occasional elephant wander by. Once again, the food was very good, this time eaten overlooking all those animals and the edge of Lake Ndutu. There were even some animals in the lodge - two genets, the size of large house cats and with long tails, hung out in the rafters of the dining room (and accepted handouts) and enormous beetles with clacking wings flew around the lamps at night, violently crashing every few minutes, which made our cribbage games a little more exciting.