Do I need more than one day in the crater?

Most people do one full descent, and that is usually enough — the floor is only about 260 square kilometres and you can cover it well in six hours. A second day makes sense if rhino matter to you, or if you want to add Empakaai or the Olduvai Gorge.

How likely is a black rhino sighting?

Better here than anywhere else on the northern circuit, but still not guaranteed and usually at distance. Bring binoculars.

Is the crater too crowded?

It can be, between about 09:00 and 13:00 at a good sighting. We manage it by descending at opening time and being back on the rim for lunch, which changes the experience completely.

Ngorongoro Crater — safaris, wildlife and when to go

The crater is what remains of a volcano that blew its top and fell in on itself. The floor sits some six hundred metres below the rim, and roughly twenty-five thousand large animals live down there more or less permanently, because the grazing and water never fail.

The effect is unlike anywhere else on the northern circuit. You descend at dawn through cloud forest, drop onto open grassland, and within twenty minutes have seen lion, hyena, hippo, elephant and several thousand wildebeest without moving far. It is the most reliable Big Five morning in Tanzania.

It is also busy. Vehicle numbers on the floor are capped and descent times are managed, but by nine in the morning the popular lion sightings can attract a queue. We start early — first vehicle down, out before the crowd builds. Even so, the crater is a spectacle rather than a wilderness.

From our guides

Stay on the rim, not down in Karatu, if the budget allows. Being twenty minutes from the descent road rather than an hour is the difference between arriving first and arriving eleventh.

Why come here

The best odds of black rhino anywhere in northern Tanzania
The Big Five possible in a single morning
Enormous bull elephants with tusks you rarely see elsewhere
Rim lodges with a view straight down into the caldera

The wildlife

Around twenty-five thousand large mammals on the crater floor: wildebeest, zebra, buffalo, eland, Thomson’s and Grant’s gazelle, plus a dense and well-studied lion population and Tanzania’s highest concentration of spotted hyena. A small, closely protected population of black rhino survives on the floor. Giraffe are absent — the descent is too steep. Flamingo gather on Lake Magadi when conditions suit.

When to visit

The crater works all year. June to October is driest and busiest. The green season from November to May is beautiful on the rim, though the descent road can be slippery. Mornings are genuinely cold at 2,200 metres in any month — bring a fleece.