3 Days Ngorongoro Crater Safari Tanzania

Day 1 of 3 Days Ngorongoro Crater Safari Tanzania: Arusha – Ngorongoro Crater

First day of your Ngorongoro Safari safari you leave Arusha town as early as 07.00 – 08.00 AM and drive through the Masai Steppe and pass Lake Manyara area in the Rift valley; drive up the escapement and across the Karatu area to the Loduare Gate of On Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area. After a short stop at the gate for registration we drive up to the Viewpoint where we make a brief stop to get some of the most breathtaking views over the Crater floor and take some photos.

We then descend into the Ngorongoro Crater floor for game drives for the rest of the day. Picnic lunch will be served at the picnic site by the hippo poolside then continue with game drives later in the afternoon we drive up the Crater rim and out to Karatu for overnight at a lodge. Ngorongoro Crater Safari Park, Lunch, and dinner included.

Day 2 of 3 Days Ngorongoro Crater Safari Tanzania: Ngorongoro Crater

After breakfast, you will descend into the Ngorongoro Crater also often referred to as the “Eden of Africa”. The largest unbroken caldera in the world; the Ngorongoro Crater is unparalleled in terms of wildlife concentration. Your drive will be in constant contact with other drivers to locate the best sightings of animals and with a little luck, you will be able to spot the big 5 inside the Crater. Lunch will be served at the picnic site and late in the afternoon we will drive back to the Crater rim and drive to your lodge at Karatu; a lodge-like!

Destination: Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area
Accommodation Options
Luxury: Neptune Ngorongoro Luxury Lodge
Mid-range: Ngorongoro Crater Lodge
Budget: Simba A Campsite
Meals Plan: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner
Drinking Water throughout

Day 3 of 3 Days Ngorongoro Crater Safari Tanzania: Ngorongoro – Arusha

On this day after a leisurely breakfast at the lodge, you will choose between visiting a Masai Village and going for a nature walk in the forests of Ngorongoro (at a small extra fee). Guided by an armed ranger you will walk in the forest trails and if lucky you might bump into herds of buffaloes, and elephants as well as other forest species like the duikers, also lion leopards, etc.

After the activities, you will drive back to Arusha town with a brief stop at Karatu and Mto Wa Mbu market towns where you may mingle with the locals and do some shopping if you so wish. End of the 03 days Safari in Ngorongoro Crater. Thank you for choosing Paradise Adventure Vacations, We hope to see you again.

End of 3 Days Ngorongoro Crater Safari Tanzania

Attractions Ngorongoro Crater Safari Park

Lake Magadi:

There are so many memorable places to visit on nature vacation in Tanzania. Within the Ngorongoro Crater itself, Lake Magadi, shallow, azure blue, fiercely alkaline from sodium carbonate, is fringed by hundreds of long-legged pink flamingos. Most are lesser flamingos, distinguished by their dark red bills, which eat blue-green spirulina algae.

But there are also many greater flamingos with black-tipped pink bills, slightly bent to facilitate sifting shellfish from the rich bottom mud. The lake shrinks noticeably in the dry season, leaving thick, crystalline salt pans used as licks by jackals, hyenas, and other animals to supplement their diet. Outside the Ngorongoro Crater (view map), but still within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, are many other regions well worth visiting on your African Mecca expedition tour of Tanzania.

Lerai Fever Tree Forest:

The Lerai Fever Tree Forest, which consists of tall, slim yellow barked acacias forming an airy, lace-canopied wonderland of glades, is much frequented by elephant, rhino, eland, bushbuck, hyrax, and hundreds of birds. This foliage is the preferred food of the rare, black rhinoceros, but the old forest is regenerating slowly, because of damage by elephants, which tear off whole branches rather than merely grazing.

Ngorongoro Crater Safari Park However, seedlings are spreading through the Gorigor Swamps, home to hippopotamus and wading birds, and the favored drinking place of thousands of ungulates during the dry season. A younger Fever Tree forest is now forming new groves at the base of the Ngoitokitok Springs, the home ground of the famous Tokitok pride of lions, film, and television personalities in their own right.

Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli Ngorongoro Safari safari

Lake Ndutu and Lake Maseko are also on the migratory route in the Rift Valley, not far from Olduvai Gorge, where the ancestors of mankind began the journey towards civilization, with the fabrication of the earliest tools and the building of the first human settlements. At Laetoli, hominid footprints of our genetic ancestors and their relatives, have been found in sedimentary rock 3.7 million years old.

No Tanzanian safari would be complete without a guided tour of the excavations and modest paleoanthropological museum at Olduvai where you can also see evolutionary fossils. But we are their descendants, and in making our mother tour of Africa, we are returning to our ancestral home.

Shifting Sands:

Ash from Ol Dionyo has formed Shifting Sands – a black dune of moving sand a hundred meters in length, and nine meters high, which ingeniously moves slowly across the plains at a rate of 15 meters every year.

Olmoti Crater and Empakaai Crater:

Your Ngorongoro safari with African Mecca holds endless riveting possibilities. You can take gentle, guided walks to two other nearby craters. Olmoti Crater is a shallow, grassy hollow, very quiet and lovely, where Maasai pasture their cattle alongside eland, bushbuck, reedbuck, and an occasional buffalo. From the south wall of the caldera, the Munge stream forms a delightful waterfall, plunging several hundred meters into the Ngorongoro crater to feed Lake Magadi. Empakaai Crater is half-filled by an unusually deep soda lake.

Ngorongoro Crater Safari Park. From the rim, you can look across an exhilarating panorama of volcanic craters and depressions towards Ol Doinyo Legai, the Great African Rift Valley, and even, in super clear weather, snows on the distant Uhuru peak of Kilimanjaro. You can walk for many kilometers around the lushly forested green bowl, frequented by blue monkeys, brilliantly colored sunbirds, and red-crested turaco.

Olmoti Crater and Empakaai Ngorongoro Safari safari

To the northeastern zone, the primeval Gol Mountains provide a surreal wilderness environment of stark, pink cliffs, enclosing the Angata Kiti pass, a bottleneck for the annual Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebra, searching for mineral-rich grasses as they return to their ancestral breeding grounds in southern Serengeti and the Ndutu wilderness.

Nasera Rock:

Rising 80 meters from the foot of the Gol Mountains, monolithic Nasera Rock is home to mountaineering klipspringers, baboons, and varied birds. It is also the location of a Stone Age human shelter, excavated by the Leakeys.

Salei Plains and Ol Karien Gorge:

Ol Karien Gorge is a sheer rock-sided ravine at the end of the vast, bare Salei Plains. It is a Mecca for twitchers, because rappel’s griffon vulture breeds there in March and April, coinciding with the passage of the Great Migration to provide plentiful food.

Oldeani Mountain:

To the southwest of Ngorongoro crater, bamboo-clad Oldeani Mountain feeds the stream that supports the Lerai Forest, whilst seasonal Lake Eyasi is a lodestone for archaeological and cultural safaris in East Africa. Paleolithic sites include Mumba cave and nearby Nasera Rock.

Hadzabe Tribe:

Lake Eyasi, close to Ngorongoro is still home to the Hadzabe Bushmen of East Africa who subsists entirely from the wild, communicating by clicks and whistles. Mbulu and Datoga pastoral and farming tribes, who were ousted centuries ago from lands now occupied by the Maasai, have now settled there.

Ol Doinyo Lengai & Lake Natron:

Further north-east near the border of Kenya, Ol Doinyo Lengai casts its conical shadow across the plains from the edge of the Great African Rift Valley escarpment. Known to Maasai as “The Mountain of God”, it is still active, last erupting in 2007. Intrepid adventurers may climb its lava-encrusted slopes to stare down into its main crater and be perilously rewarded with sulfur fumes and occasional spurts of lava from smaller surrounding cones. Ngorongoro Crater Safari Park.

It was featured in the Lara Croft film, “Tomb Raiders II”, but has been more seriously researched and popularized by Chris Hug-Fleck and Evelyne Pradel. Lake Natron, far below, is fed by hot, mineral springs so heavily saturated with volcanic ash from Ol Doinyo Lengai that it provides a toxic, protective moat for Africa’s largest concentration of breeding lesser and greater flamingos. The lake itself shines like a jewel, sometimes green and blue, sometimes blooming red with cyanobacteria and algae which provide their food.