Our Final Safari Day

Ngorngoro Crater:

Today is our last day on Safari.  Tomorrow we drive back to Arusha for lunch and then onto Mount Kilimanjaro to get on an airplane.  We left the Serengeti this morning to go down into Ngorongoro Crater.  We arrived around 10:00 a.m.  The inside of the crater was beautiful.  We got lots of great scenery pictures.  Today’s challenge was to see the last of the big five: the rhino.  However I guess rhino are shy and hard to see up close because they do not like to be close to the road.  We saw three rhino today: one up close and two far away.  They did not move much and pretty much just ate grass the whole time.  Two wart hogs walked up close to the one rhino and it did not seem to even notice its presence.  I guess rhino are solitary animals so they are often found alone as the one we saw closer up.  We saw an abundance of wildebeest and zebras.  They graze together often.  We got to see a lot of baby wildebeest and zebras as well.  They stick near their mothers and we saw several of them nursing throughout the day.  We also saw flamingos, cranes, gazelles, an African dog, and buffalo.  We also saw a hyena chased around a lot of wildebeest which seemed funny to us since the wildebeest are so much bigger and were greater in number.       

We had lunch in the crater at a little pond.  We were told to eat our lunch in the vehicles because birds are overly aggressive there in regards to food.  We walked around the pond afterwards.  You could see several hippos deep in the middle swimming around.  We could also see and smell a lot of what we suspect is elephant poop.  It was everywhere which also made up glad that we ate in our vehicle. 

After lunch, we saw the highlight of our Safari.  We came across a cheetah stalking a gazelle.  We pulled over (along with ten or fifteen other vehicles) to see what happened.  The cheetah slowly got closer to the gazelle (which had no idea it was being stalked).  The cheetah finally made a run for it and the gazelle ran away.  The gazelle did not make it far before the cheetah attacked it and killed it.  The cheetah then feasted on the gazelle.  We could not believe we were able to watch this occur.  It made me a little bit sad though when our guide pointed out a baby gazelle hiding in the tall grass.  Obviously the cheetah had made an orphan of it.  The orphaned gazelle was all alone so we guess its chances of survival are very low. 

Tonight we are staying right on top of the crater.  We have an amazing view of it.  Tomorrow we leave for Arusha and to do some shopping on the way.  We are so glad to have had this experience together.  We cannot wait to share it all with you but please, don’t worry that we will make you look at endless pictures or listen to endless stories.  We appreciate everyone taking an interest in this and we cannot wait to blog about our next trip to Ethiopia to actually pick Crew up to bring him home.