The place
The Ngorongoro Crater is what remains of a volcano that collapsed in on itself some two and a half million years ago — a caldera roughly 19 kilometres across, 260 square kilometres of floor, ringed by walls standing around 600 metres high. Nothing quite prepares you for the first look over the rim.
Inside is a closed world of grassland, soda lake, fever-tree forest and swamp holding somewhere near 25,000 large animals year-round — there is no migration here, because there is no need to leave. It is among the most reliable places in Tanzania to find black rhino, and it carries one of the densest lion populations anywhere on the continent. The wider Conservation Area, 8,292 square kilometres of it, is not a national park but a multiple-use landscape where Maasai families still graze cattle alongside the wildlife — and it holds Olduvai Gorge, where the Leakeys' finds rewrote human prehistory.
Why go
A single descent that most guests rank as the finest day of the whole safari.
When to visit
The crater delivers year-round, because its game does not migrate. June to October is driest and clearest, with the easiest descent roads. The green months either side are quieter and beautiful on the rim, though afternoon cloud can settle into the caldera.
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Ready when you are
Almost every Northern Circuit route runs Tarangire, then Ngorongoro, then the Serengeti — the crater sits three hours from Arusha and a morning's drive from the plains.
