Ngorongoro Conservation Area

The crater is what's left of a volcano that collapsed in on itself. The floor sits around 600 metres below the rim, the walls run all the way round, and inside you get roughly 260 square kilometres of grassland, swamp and soda lake. The animals living there have very little reason to leave.

It's the one place in Tanzania where you've got a real chance of seeing black rhino. It's also one of very few places where lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino all live in the same small area.

The crater is the largest intact volcanic caldera in the world: about 260 square kilometres of floor, surrounded by walls six hundred metres high. What does that shape do? It holds one of the densest gatherings of large mammals anywhere in Africa. Most of the animals don't migrate out. They've got water, grazing and shelter right there inside, so they simply stay.

In practice, that means a single day on the crater floor can turn up more species than three days somewhere else. It also makes the crater the most realistic place in Tanzania to see black rhino, thanks to a small and closely protected population living on the floor. They're usually a long way off and usually seen through binoculars, but they're still the reason plenty of people come.

There are two things worth knowing before you arrive. The first is that this is a Conservation Area, not a national park, and the difference is real. Maasai families live here and graze their cattle alongside the wildlife, which is unusual and completely deliberate. You'll see herds and herders up on the highlands, and that's the system working, not failing.

The second is that the crater gets busy. In August there'll be other vehicles at a good sighting. The one thing that really changes your experience is being on the floor in the first hour after the gate opens, and that mostly depends on where you slept the night before.

Black rhino. The star of the show. There's a small, closely watched population on the crater floor, most often spotted at a distance on the open grassland early in the morning. Bring binoculars and keep your expectations in check. A rhino here is a genuine treat, not a certainty.

Lion. Resident prides live on the floor, and they're so used to vehicles it can be startling if it's your first sighting. The crater lions are famously inbred, because they've been cut off for a long time and newcomers rarely make it over the walls. If you like reading about conservation genetics, that's fascinating stuff.

Elephant. Mostly old bulls on the floor, and some of them carry the kind of tusks that have become rare elsewhere in Africa. Breeding herds tend to stick to the forests on the rim and the highlands.

Hippo, buffalo and wildebeest in big numbers, with the hippos hanging out at Ngoitokitok springs and the Mandusi swamp.

Flamingo on Lake Magadi, the soda lake on the crater floor. Their numbers rise and fall entirely with the rain and the algae it brings. Some months there are thousands, some months there are almost none, and honestly, nobody can tell you in advance which you'll get.

Cheetah and leopard are both here, and both harder to find. The crater floor isn't great cheetah country, since there are too many lions and hyenas ready to steal their kills, and leopards keep to the forest on the walls.

Golden jackal, serval and spotted hyena are all common, and they're all worth stopping for, whatever the vehicle in front of you is doing.

The caldera formed when a volcano, probably as big as Kilimanjaro, collapsed in on its own emptied magma chamber somewhere around two and a half million years ago. What's left is an almost perfect bowl: a grassland floor, a soda lake at the lowest point, a yellow-fever acacia forest at Lerai, spring-fed swamps, and walls that climb six hundred metres to a rim at over 2,200 metres.

Up on the rim it's a different world from the floor. It's high, cold, often in cloud, and covered in mountain forest. You can be standing in mist and drizzle up there while the floor below is in full sun! That's why rooms on the rim have fireplaces, and why people who only packed for the tropics end up shivering.

The wider Conservation Area is much bigger than the crater. It stretches north and west across the highlands to the Serengeti boundary, taking in Olmoti and Empakaai craters, the Ndutu area on the southern plains, and Olduvai Gorge. That's where the Leakeys' digs turned up some of the most important hominin fossils ever found, and the site museum there is a really worthwhile hour.

The crater itself isn't part of the migration. Its animals live there all year and stay put, and that's exactly what makes it so reliable in the months when the herds are somewhere else.

The wider Conservation Area is a different story. The Ndutu area, in the south-east of the ecosystem, sits on the short-grass plains where the wildebeest give birth from roughly December to March. Ndutu is inside the Conservation Area, not inside Serengeti National Park, which confuses a lot of people reading itineraries. You can be “in Ngorongoro” and still be two hours from the crater, right in the middle of the calving.

Travelling in January or February? Then that combination, the calving grounds at Ndutu plus a day on the crater floor, is one of the best weeks you can have anywhere in Tanzania. And it's nowhere near as busy as crossing season in the north.

The crater floor. You drive down, spend half a day or a full day, and drive back up. Vehicles go down one road and come up another, and there's a time limit on how long you can stay down there. Right now it's six hours, but that rule has changed before and it'll change again. The whole trick is getting down there as the gate opens.

Olduvai Gorge. It's on the road between the crater and the Serengeti, so it costs you almost nothing in extra driving. The museum is small and well done, and it puts the landscape you're driving through into a two-million-year story.

Empakaai crater. A walk down into a smaller caldera with a deep soda lake and, often, flamingos. Fair warning: it's a proper hike. It's steep, and you have to climb back out. It's also one of the few places around here where you actually get to be on foot.

Maasai villages. Done properly, a visit is really worthwhile. Done badly, it's uncomfortable for everybody. We only use visits that are set up so the money reaches the community, not a middleman, and we'll say no to anything else.

The rim walk. A walk along the forested crater rim with a ranger, looking down into the bowl. It's cheap, cold and early, and it's one of the best hours you can spend in the area.

By road from Arusha, it's roughly three to four hours to the rim. The road is tarmac most of the way, then it climbs through Karatu and up into the highlands. Nearly every northern circuit itinerary passes through here, because the road to the Serengeti runs right across the Conservation Area.

By air, you can fly to the Lake Manyara airstrip and drive from there. But the crater is close enough to Arusha that flying rarely makes sense, unless you're connecting from somewhere further away.

Fees. The Conservation Area charges an entry fee per person, per twenty-four hours, plus a separate crater service fee per vehicle for the drive down. These are set by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority. The crater descent fee is why a day here costs more than a day almost anywhere else in Tanzania, and it's the line that quietly goes missing from cheap quotes.

Where you sleep decides your morning. Staying on the rim puts you at the descent road in minutes. Karatu, an hour below, is warmer and cheaper, but it costs you an hour at each end of the day. Both are sensible choices. We'll tell you which one fits your itinerary, instead of just defaulting to the pricier one.