Unlike the other protected areas in the region, Ngorongoro is not a national park but a conservation area. This means that the land is managed not only for the benefit of the natural flora and fauna, but the Maasai people too are permitted to live in the area, their cattle sharing the grazing with the indigenous grazers.

 The Ngorongoro Highlands are the most fabulous region of dramatic volcanic scenery, with an unbelievable range of landscapes and micro-climates, from the rain forested eastern slopes above the rift escarpment, through the peaks and craters of the central region and then down into the arid semi-desert areas on the western Serengeti side.

 One of the great advantages that the NCA offers visitors is the freedom to walk and hike freely across the landscape (although not in the Ngorongoro Crater itself and always accompanied by a park ranger). This makes it possible to get out of the Landover for a while and really get to appreciate the area in depth. 

Ngorongoro Crater

The Ngorongoro Crater is in actual fact not a crater but a caldera. That is to say that it is the remains of a volcano which has completely collapsed at a time when the molten magma inside it died back during a period of inactivity. The volcano of Ngorongoro is reckoned to have been considerably higher than even the great Kilimanjaro before its collapse. If you look at the angle of its flanks now and project them up into the air it is almost possible to envisage the size of this great snow-capped mountain and the enormity of the event by which the crater that exists today was formed, around two million years ago. Ngorongoro is the largest un flooded caldera in the world. The crater hosts a remarkable wildlife spectacle. Contained within these walls are microcosms of so many of the eco-systems of this part of the world. There is savanna, bush land, forests and lakes, inhabited by the same range of game, from elephant to lion to wildebeest. There is even a soda lake for the flamingos and in the green season small numbers of wildebeest migrate through. The crater has permanent water too. The only absentee of note is the giraffe, which cannot manage the steep slopes. Heaven knows how the hippo got here

Visiting the crater is one of Africa's great safari highlights. The downside of this is that there is inevitably quite a lot of traffic, with up to 200 vehicles entering on peak days. The trick is to visit out of season or to hit it at unusual hours of the day (very early, very late or around lunchtime when everyone else goes to the lake for a picnic). Actually the traffic is not so bad, provided that you are headed out to somewhere remote at other times during your safari

The southern part of the Ngorongoro Highlands are very beautiful and yet very rarely visited. Adjacent to the Ngorongoro Crater there are three main volcanic masses in this area. Oldeani straddles the rift escarpment and is amongst the oldest volcano in the region, with a rarely explored crater. The smaller Sadiman leads up the Makarot, which it the larger volcano that dominates the Southern Serengeti. Heading on south towards the small town of Endulen, there are some fine stands of acacia forest before the landscape opens up to sweeping pastures, with distant views past thatched hut villages and over the Eyasi Escarpment to the great soda lake beyond. It is in the remote forests around Lake Eyasi that the Hadzabe people hunt and gather their food.

 About an hour past Endulen is Laetoli, the location for the Leakey's magnificent discovery of footprints in the rock - over a million years old and clear evidence of man walking upright - the arrival of Homo erectus