Kuuliza si ujinga

Around two weeks ago, I finally went to Ngorongoro Crater. This after a year of seeing tourists every time I went to town, and looking at the mountain that contains Ngorongoro from my village every day.

And yes, it is truly beautiful. After hearing about it so much I was kind of skeptical--when you live next to a park for so long, it starts to seem ordinary. But Ngorongoro is amazing and looks nothing like my domesticated, farming village. To get there, you first climb up the mountain, through jungle with baboons and views of forested hills. Then you reach the top, and there's an amazing view of the crater below: long, long stretches of grass dotted with lakes and rivers. You descend into the crater and suddenly you're in the grasslands. It's not high grass, but rather a low, bright green grass, well-cropped by the local grazing animals. And on all sides of you, encircling you, are the green slopes of the crater.

There are an incredible number of animals. We saw huge herds of buffalo grazing together with zebra. We saw a male lion dragging a recently killed zebra across the road, with three female lions watching from the branches of a tree (yes lions climb trees!). We saw a cheetah stalking gazelle, and another cheetah having its kill stolen by hyenas. There was a pool full of hippos with birds perched on their backs. There were warthogs rooting in the dirt,and herds of gazelle everywhere. No elephants or giraffes--they're rarely found inside the crater--but we did see a rhinoceros in the far, far distance.

That's Ngorongoro, the bluish mountain I see everyday from my site. I look at it from farmland, from a land of cows and corn, of tractors and plows pulled by oxen. But from close up, it's clear that Ngorongoro is another world: a bit of the western idea of Africa, a bit of how much of this area looked years ago, and, very much, the world of African nature documentaries. I highly recommend a visit.

(I'll post pictures in a few weeks when I have a good internet connection).