Ngorongoro Crater Environment

The Ngorongoro Crater Environment is utterly unique - and offers a rare insight into an unspoilt paradise.

The Crater was formed by the collapse of one of Africa's volcanic giants over two million years ago. This was a volcano so high that it is likely that it would have overshadowed Mount Kilimanjaro - if it had not blown up instead, covering the Serengeti in ash and collapsing to the crater floor.

Ngorongoro Crater is now the world's largest intact volcanic caldera.

The approach to the Ngorongoro Crater rim is typified by thick montane forest. Winding your way up to the rim, expectation and excitement heighten the senses and the scent of evergreen trees wafts towards you. At the top, your eyes quickly free fall down the steep crater slopes covered in scrub heath, long grasslands and dense evergreen montane forests.

Six hundred metres below, the undulating plains of the Ngorongoro Crater floor form a haze of dusty reds and yellows, and colours dance along the horizon in playful light. Clear lines can be traced around thick forest, open savannah and grassland. In the distance, Lake Magadi - tinged pink with the colour of its resident flamingos - lies on the crater floor.

Descending into the crater, your view of a long hilly horizon, coloured in striking blues and lively greens, is radically altered as the crater walls seem to rise up around you.

Open grassland covers most of the Ngorongoro Crater floor, and as a result thousands of wildebeest and zebra graze here. Making your way into the Lerai Forest you're soon surrounded by yellow fever trees - home to the resident herd of old elephant bulls.

To the north of the forest there's a shallow soda lake that shrinks and swells dramatically according to the season. To the south and east of the soda lake you will find seasonally affected swampland. The northern section of the crater is drier and is dissected by a thicket fringed river that forms a large area of seasonal swampland.

The south and west of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area comprise volcanic highlands. The highlands include the Ngorongoro Crater as well as the lesser known Empakaai Crater, a 6km wide, and 300m deep volcanic crater that is mostly filled by a soda lake. The southern and eastern boundaries are crudely defined by the rim of the Great Rift Valley, preventing wildlife migration in these directions.

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