African Safari, part 4:

If Shifting Sands was a special site generating some amount of metaphysical horsepower, our descent into the Ngorongoro Crater proved to be positively singular and magical. First, while we paid a hefty price in the Serengeti for that unusual rainfall, we were reimbursed--with interest--two days later by the almost hallucinatory lushness of the Crater, billed as the world’s largest unbroken caldera, or collapsed volcano. Where the various shades of various earth tones that marked most of the areas we’d seen during the first half of our safari were very much what I expected, we were stunned by the impossibly verdant vistas everywhere you looked in the Crater. It was green, I tell ya! And, with a wall-to-wall emerald carpet of grass, as well as all kinds of thick green bush and trees--the makings for sumptuous buffet meals of another sort--it was no surprise that the place was so jammed with animals that it resembled the 405 on Friday afternoon: Lots and lots of zebra and wildebeest and male elephants (for whatever reason, only bulls descend into the Crater; for more obvious reasons of locomotion, giraffes don’t at all), two or three dozen hippos bobbing in a watering hole. There were also gobs of Thomson Gazelles, two braces of mating lions, and a multitude of cape buffalo, wart hogs, hyena, jackal, hartebeest and a few scattered cheetah. One cheetah looked to be just strolling, lazing about, then--bang!--he started running, quickly accelerated into a sprint and in seconds was bearing down on a baby Thomson Gazelle. Fear not: the “Tommy” got away.

Not long after, we glimpsed some black rhinos, first one snoozing off in the distance, then a few minutes later, a pair lumbered by much closer. We were pretty excited: It was our first black rhino encounter of the trip and we knew that many travelers complete an entire safari without seeing one of these exceedingly rare and reclusive creatures. We were thrilled with our good fortune.

If we’d also spotted a leopard, on just this day alone we would have managed to see all of the “Big Five.” A term that originated with hunters, it refers to five of Africa’s major wild animals--lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino--and many safari- goers feel their trip is lacking without having seen, at some point, this quintet. Nobody on this safari had to worry about that disappointment: As close as we came that day in the Crater, before trip’s end, we’d seen the Big Five many times over.

That was exceptionally exciting, but just one of many trip traits that served to thrill and delight this first-time visitor. Others included the sheer, awe-inspiring beauty of East Africa...the open, enormous expanses as far as the proverbial eye could see... the land appears, with notably few exceptions, undeveloped, unharmed, untouched...the quiet; often, it’s almost poetically still and silent (apart from the logorrhea in our midst)...the temperature tended to hover in the mid-70s--slighter warmer certain days, somewhat

cooler closer to the mountains, but always quite comfortable...the absence of bugs virtually everywhere--there were no mosquitoes to speak of, though we certainly took the antimalarial medication that all travelers to that regions are advised to...

The buzz of our Ngorongoro experience--a key highlight in a trip full of them-- carried us through the long, long, long day of driving from the Crater area, all the way across the Tanzania/Kenya border (for better or worse, no flying this time; the entire journey was made by van), ultimately back toward Nairobi and returning to our beloved “base camp” at the Nairobi Safari Club.

For me, I don’t think the rest of the trip ever reached the dizzying heights of the Ngorongoro adventure (or the opening avalanche of elephants at Amboseli), but the trip was nothing less than stellar and the remaining days delivered its own share of highlights, whether lounging in the wide-open lap of luxury, or padding around cramped and minimalist confines for an animal-viewing slumber party to end all slumber parties.