Sorry Ngorongoro is so late. It exam time so I’ve been pretty delayed in my postings. Anyway Friday (2/24) we were off to visit Ngorongoro Crater, the eighth natural wonder of the world. Honestly I had no idea what to expect. But when I arrived I was soon to find out. The drive took about half hour to the gate where we then had to wait another hour and half to get cleared for entrance. When we entered we drove up this crazy winding mountain, (the crater's outside walls) straight to the public governments office were we learned how they managed the conservation area. We had to take notes because although we were on this amazing safari trip this was still school work. But I didn’t mind the half hour lecture if that meant soon after we were going to see lions and zebras and hyenas !! When the lecture was over our first stop was the lookout point where we saw down into the crater. I knew shortly that we would soon be descending into it. After taking some pictures of the lookout point we started driving down to the middle of the crater. It was overwhelming all the different animals we saw at once. Look to the left it’s a zebra to the right there’s jackels and walking right in front of our car was a hyena. Totally ditching our homework assignment we jumped up on the roof and began taking pictures. This was by far my favorite park already and we’ve only been there for 5 minutes. I couldn’t wait to see what else it had to offer. We drove all over the park telling Kioko (our teacher and driver for the day) where to go. After a few hours of driving around we came to a fork in the road, debating weather to go left or right (left was lions and other SFS vehicles and right was unknown but a lot of tourist cars were gathered around a tree). Kioko chose left and as we sat for a while and observed our first lions of the day. I then got too excited about what was on the other side of the road and wanted to pull a u-turn. We quickly swung around and started driving to the unknown. When we pulled up all we saw were guineafowls (a type of bird). Everyone was pretty confused at what we were supposed to be looking at and then Kioko points out the cheetah in the bushes. Of course I took about 50 pictures of the one cheetah just sitting there yawning but still exciting. Anyway after we kept driving around remembering to still record the animals we saw for our homework. At one point we met another SFS vehicle while we were watching more lions and they said they saw rhinos down the road. Sure enough we were all yelling at Kioko to find the rhinos. A little ways down the road he proposed he’ll buy us a soda to the first person in the car who found the rhinos. Were going crazy looking for the rhinos when little did we know they were right in front of us the whole time, although they were over 200 meters from our cars (we used the range finder). I looked through my binoculars and asked if those little grey dots were the rhinos. They were, there were 2 adults and a baby, which I mistook for a warthog (the warthogs were next to the rhinos). Needless to saw they were very far from the car but I claimed I still saw rhinos! Soon we were getting hungry and it was time for lunch by the hippo pool. We sat and had lunch in the car and then got to wander around and watch the hippos. They too were pretty far away but Me and Nuru (another driver from a different car) sat for a while and talked about hippos. They were actually really neat. Maybe my second favorite animal?? After lunch we finished our game drive around the crater as Kioko blazed through the trails. It was a lot of fun whipping back and forth. Soon it was time to meet the other vehicles at the top of the crater to head home. I must say it was a fantastic day, and I passed out for the whole half hour drive back to camp. 
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