Ngorongoro Crater

Two to three million years ago a volcano larger than Kilimanjaro collapsed in on itself and left a crater twenty kilometres across with walls six hundred metres high. The floor is two hundred and sixty square kilometres of grassland, swamp, soda lake and acacia forest, and it holds somewhere around twenty five thousand large animals that mostly never leave.

The density is what people remember. On the crater floor you are rarely more than a few minutes from something. It is also the most reliable place in Tanzania to see black rhino, and one of very few places where they can still be found at all.

Ngorongoro is a conservation area rather than a national park, which means the Maasai still graze cattle here alongside the wildlife, as they have for generations. You will pass herders on the rim road. That coexistence is part of what you are looking at, and it is unusual in East Africa.