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October 11, 6:30 pm:
After breakfast this morning we headed out on our long drive to
the Serengeti, 375 km away, on the worst road I've ever traveled.
It's a great advertisement for the rover that it didn't come apart
at the seams. A real back breaker.
We passed Lake Manyara and headed up the
steep Rift wall to the Ngorongoro Highlands. Beautiful views of
the Rift Valley below. On top, fields of wheat and corn grow in
a rich red volcanic soil. Children on the side of the road begged
for pens as we passed, not that they needed them - pens are cheap
here - it's just the novelty of getting a pen from abroad. Some
kids danced with masks on, and played instruments, hoping that would
convince us to hand something over. Tobias said they were out there
just because they don't want to go to school.
A little while passed, and we started to
climb Ngorongoro Crater. Lush tropical jungle surrounded us. We
parked at an overlook at 7500 feet and stepped out into the cool
air for our first view of the caldera. Spectacular. Twenty million
years ago East Africa developed a huge rift, and numerous volcanoes
began to build up over time. By 2.5 million years ago, Ngorongoro
may have rivaled Kilimanjaro in size. But its vents eventually plugged,
the lava moved elsewhere, and the mountain collapsed, resulting
in the largest extinct caldera in the world. One hundred square
miles of wildlife paradise. Forest, savanna, marsh, alkaline lake,
it has a wide variety of habitat niches to fill in a relatively
protected area. In this dry season, the lake was nearly gone, and
the white salts shone like snow in the sunshine. Buffalo, elephant,
and wildebeest could all be made out from the rim, though they were
tiny, slow-moving figures in this grand Eden.
We continued down the back side of the crater,
past numerous herds of cattle tended by Maasai men and boys. Stopping
for a picnic lunch in the shade under an acacia, we could see where
we were headed - across the Olduvai Gorge and into the seemingly
endless Serengeti Plain, the flat savanna stretching as far as the
eye could see.
Before even reaching the Serengeti National
Park border, we spotted our first cheetah, ambling along in the
short parched grasses. A magnificent creature - graceful, lean,
powerful, moving with no wasted effort, ignoring us, heading off
into unknown reaches of the plains. A real treat to see one so close.
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