Ngorongoro Crater: what a day on the floor is actually like

The crater is the one place in Tanzania where the Big Five can be seen in a morning, and everyone knows it. That is why the way you do it matters more than whether you do it.

The descent

Vehicles enter on a permit that allows six hours on the floor. The descent road drops six hundred metres in twenty minutes of switchbacks, and the first hour after the gates open is the quietest the floor ever is. We aim to be at the gate at first light, which means a lodge in Karatu or on the rim and an alarm before five. It is cold up there; bring the fleece.

On the floor

The crater is a bowl nineteen kilometres across with a soda lake, a marsh, a fever tree forest and open grassland, and about twenty five thousand large animals that mostly never leave. Lion prides lie in the open. Elephant bulls with enormous tusks walk the Lerai forest. Hyena are everywhere. Black rhino graze the short grass near the lake, and the crater is the one place in the north where seeing one is likely rather than lucky.

Lunch is a picnic at the hippo pool, where the kites have learned to take sandwiches out of hands. Eat in the vehicle.

The rim

Most people see the crater as a day trip from Karatu, which works. Sleeping on the rim costs more and gives you the sunrise over the caldera from your bed, a walk along the rim with a ranger in the afternoon, and the shortest possible drive to the gate. Our four-day sunrise trip is built around that.

Honest expectations

Between nine and eleven in the morning in August the floor is busy, and a good sighting will have a queue of vehicles. Early entry, a full day and a guide on the radio fix most of that. Leopard are on the crater walls and rarely seen; the Serengeti is the place for them.