Saturday, July 24.

Ngorongoro Crater.

There are hardly words. "Surreal" is one I've used a lot today. "Awesome" is another.

List of animals I've never seen in the wild until today:

-Baboons
-Zebras
-Wildebeest
-Lions (a group of young males, and a pride with cubs!)
-Bull elephants
-Gray crown cranes
-Yellow-billed storks
-A lone cheetah (from a distance)
-Hippos
-African buffalo
-Jackals
-Hyenas
-Thompson's gazelle
-Grant's gazelle
-Kori bustard birds (the guides' accents had us thinking they were called "bastards," not bustards. Oops.)
-Warthogs
-Ostriches (male and female)
-Flamingos
-Vultures
-Monkeys (with bright blue testicles)

I really can't do any of it justice here. Except to say that our driver, Godfrey, isn't a maniac like I thought--but is, in fact, awesome. We'd see an animal from afar, and screech, "Lion!" or "Hippo!" (or sometimes just "Ooooh!") and he'd somehow magically get us 30 feet from the thing.

Our guides know their shit. I suppose this was probably their 7,514th visit to Ngorongoro, so they would. It's pretty amazing that this ecologically concentrated and diverse slice of African savanna exists at the bottom of a crater that's 22 kilometers across, and boasts a thick and luscious mountain rainforest on the outer slopes. On our way out of the crater, I noticed the road we were driving on was bordered by about 3 meters of land on either side that dropped away sharply: Ngorongoro on the left, and rainforest valley on the right... both THOUSANDS of feet down. That's when I realized we were driving on the crater's rim--and it was a handful of meters across.

I don't get dizzy from heights often, but... yeesh.

A spectacular day.