June 10, 2015

Today was awesome!  We spent the morning in the Ngorongoro Crater, it was as cool as I had hoped.  The trip started out great from the beginning.  We drove to near the crater to camp the night prior.  The campground was nice and we had a decent dinner cooked for us.  The highlight of dinner (for Hayden and I at least) was the giant plate of popcorn before dinner.  🙂  After dinner, some of the locals put on a dance/acrobatics show.  They were amazing…seriously, I think these guys could have taken gold in the Olympics the way they could tumble around!

We got up EARLY the next morning to get a start into the crater.  The drive in was pretty hazy, but it cleared up once we were inside of the crater.  The Ngorongoro is the largest in tact crater in the world at 260 square km….it is a really cool sight to see!

Inside of the crater, they have the Big 5 (Lions, Leopards, Elephants, Rhino, and Cape Buffalo).  We saw everything except leopards while we were driving around.

We did manage to see a few Black Rhino, but unfortunately, they were all wither in the distance or laying down (and very hard to take a picture of!)

We stopped and had lunch inside of the crater at a hippo pool, it was a great place to sit and eat.  There were zebras right next to the lunch area and tons of hippos in the pool!

Next up is the Serengeti this afternoon and again tomorrow morning.