The place I wanted to explore
Ngorongoro feels like the opening cinematic from a video game.
You descend from the rim through what looks like fog, but is actually a cloud, and the landscape opens up below you. You see lakes, rivers, forests and hills spread out before you, not one ecosystem but multiple, contained within the crater walls.
If you somehow stumbled in here as an animal you'd think it was paradise
You could spend a week - probably a lifetime - exploring this one crater. It's the fractal nature of the world made concrete
It's the kind of place that makes you want to make a map, to start assigning names and defining zones. The geography, even the weather suggests stories - every so often the clouds break and a shaft of sunlight comes down in a way that hints there's definitely something to find over there.
When I look at these landscapes I imagine exploring, climbing, finding hidden spaces, making a safe camp within and venturing forth in the morning.
Something about the crater walls around the edge makes you think of the unclimbable perimiter of a video game sandbox. No conflict but the challenge of traversing a complex environment.
I think safaris would be more fun - well, a different kind of fun - if you could drive yourself and explore. Or walk, or hike. Then again, after several weeks of, basically, being driven around, maybe I'm just craving some agency over our direction.
Unfortunately, Ngorongoro crater is not the place to get it, on account of - checks notes - the leopards.
However.
The place I got to explore.
When you approach Stone Town, it's like approaching a wall, monolithic. You enter an alley like you're entering a gate, or a tunnel.
The alleyways are tight, taller than they are wide, and the space above you is crisscrossed with lines for phones and power and washing.
This was the first concrete jungle.
The alley opens out into a courtyard, not more than a few metres to a side, a tiny local microcosm of the bigger markets around the corner.
Someone makes a delivery to the second floor from the street using a bucket on a rope. Someone has left food out for the street cats. Pigeons flock to something on the roof. Kids run around, banging things - should they be in school, or are they learning more here?
You're passed by bikes, mopeds, tuk tuks, locals on foot, and very brave or very lost cars.
Around you, doors of different shapes and sizes, which tell you what's behind themnir you know how to read them - sometimes in words, often in pictures, very occasionally in spikes.
Tarps and cloth stretch overhead and suddenly it's dark and - not cool, but somehow dryer on your skin? Fruit the size of your head. Really bad fish. Spices - smoky, woody, prickly, you can feel the heat in your nostrils.
The fabric ceilings are replaced, again, by flags, lights, the odd connecting walkway overhead, lanterns, balconies, wooden shuttered windows over tin roofs, and scaffolding.
And then you break out to the sea, and sky, and palm trees, and the equally chaotic but slower moving traffic of boats. Palaces and forts pin down the corners and points in the middle, but what happens between is in flux.
Most wondrous of all, it's all contained in a very walkable and blessedly leopard-free couple of square kilometres.
Not, all things considered, a terrible place to wander through, and, freed from the confines of your group tour, climb to the top of for some fancy dinner on your last night in Africa.
See you soon,
Rocky.