Ngorongoro Wildlife Lodge Ngorongoro Conservation Area

... house for the night, having quickly checked in, Damian and Michael had assumed their positions at one of the "live on the Coca Cola side of life" garden tables for the "tip negotiation". Arnaud and I absolutely felt we were giving what was fair and what is generally accepted as the norm, not least because there were only 2 of us. What we got were arched eyebrows and an insane request for an extortionate amount each...when we didn't budge, apalled ourselves at the change of character ...

... let someone else get a good view. So we passed the trucks on the inside, closest to the lions, our driver going slowly so that we could catch some great photographs. In fact, we almost caught more then that. The male lion had moved towards us and as we passed by he made a lunge at us and roared, baring his teeth as he leapt forward. The top of our truck is completely open and we had all been eagerly leaning forward to take ...

... a baby impala they'd caught and 6 lions in a stand off with a herd of buffalo. It definately lives up to its name in terms of wildlife! Today we headed out of the Serengeti and into the Ngorongoro Crater. Unfortunately our truck's radiator overheated so we were a bit worrid we'd have to start rationing food and stay out all night! We ended up having to cram into another truck (11 people in a single jeep driving on the bumpiest roads in Africa) before ...

... seen scenery like it anywhere i've been before, there's something striking about how red the earth is and how different it is depending how close to the water you are, you can see it change in front of your eyes over relatively short distances. Some of it's very green which surprised me - i thought of it as dry and barren (don't get me wrong a lot of it is - and very dusty) but theres patches of thick rainforest, savannah grassland and marshy green ...

... Area and that we were still quite a distance from Ngorongoro Crater National Park. Although I went down into the crater on my safari last year, I had happily agreed to see it again one morning and had brought the $30 required. However, I did not think we needed to purchase that permit until we were arrived at the park. I followed Ema into the Serengeti Office where he had been talking with one of the staff. I was shown the information that a permit to get into the ...

... was amazing. I got a really nice photo of the NK group in front of the view. The best point of day two has to be seeing the Cheetahs. There was all this commotion when a car taht we went past spoke to our driver about something they'd seen. We speed off in the direction that they said but none of us were really sure what we were off to see. When we went off the main road a little we came to a small group of trees and, sitting at the foot of two of the trees ...

... amazingly fast... not today though; they were just out for a stroll. They did send a herd of wildebeest fleeing even though they typically are too big for the cheetah to consider. As we were watching this, a HUGE lone elephant with tusks down the ground appeared on the horizon and proceeded to walk directly towards us. He was enormous and simply breathtaking. Again, great pics. We ended the day an the ...