Firstly my apologies for the long delay in this post. I have no idea why it took me so long because I honestly haven’t been doing much lol. but well. here it is. If you missed the previous post, you can find it here at Honeymoon Diaries – Safari Part I.
Day 4: NGORONGORO CRATER
I was actually pretty tired by day 4 and since on top of that I absolutely loved the place where we were staying the night before so almost told Faizan to go here on his own and just pick me up on his way back. I was tired as hell and we were asked to wake up at bloody 6 am, which wasnt motivating me much either.
But against my will, I did get up at 6 and for some reason it was insanely cold which is something you dont really expect when you are in Africa, that too in summers. We only had like a sweater each (which we packed for Dubai) so wore those and decided to head out. It took us almost an hour to reach the crater and for the first time I was happy I woke up that early. This place was magnificent. So so so gorgeous and the animals were all around us. It was insane bhaaaiiiii.
A little history, this crater apparently used to be a mountain and it kind of collapsed, so this space is the base of that once existing mountain. It is surrounded by many other peaks and so much greenery and there is also like this tiny lake like thing in the middle. You obviously have to follow the man made trail there and not get off the car at all (ours got punctured at one point, so we actually got off and stood in the middle of the crater, which btw I was super against because there were all these lions, flamingos, buffaloes, hippos, elephants, like a million types of birds and rhinos and stuff around us, but later felt pretty cool hehe) so you can see only as much as your eye sight allows. But we saw all these wonderful animals up close which was crazy (Not the hippos though because damnnnnn they are stiiinnnkkkkkyyyyyy)
And also saw a black African rhino, the race of which was declared extinct a week after we came back, so my heart actually bled. There are a total of 7 rhinos left in the crater of any form and their race is ending very fast which is too too sad.
As the sun started coming out, it got pretty warm so the sweaters were being regrettedhaha. After driving around the crater for a few hours and seeing more animals, we decided to head back to Arusha. The drive back was gorgeous.
It took us a few hours to reach back to Arusha and then took a flight from Kilimanjaro to Zanzibar from the most gorgeous airport ever. It was so tiny and simple but too beautiful.
