This article is written by Manoj Radhakrishnan, an engineer and a travel photographer & writer based in Pune

The Ngorongoro Crater

Ngorongoro, pronounced as it is written, is a caldera. Caldera, when translated to english, roughly means a crater which was created by a collapsing volcano. The Ngorongoro volcano, once upon a time, was actually taller than Kilimanjaro. Today with a diameter of 16-19 km this is easily the largest crater in the world. The view that one gets of the crater from anywhere along the rim is absolutely stunning. From the rim, the 265 sqkm large crater bed can be seen dotted with animals and with a closer observation, may be with a help of binoculars, one can not only spot herds of buffalos and wildebeest but also some pride of lions or even rhinos.

The largest land mammal : An African bull elephantNgorongoro is a queer ecosystem by itself. The crater has all the basic elements of a large national park – herbivores, cats, pachyderms, scavengers and needless to say a lake and a small ‘forest’. And this very fact that the crater is a separate ecosystem combined with the hand of man is threatening its very existence. The lions for example have been denied their free access to and from the Serengeti plains after the government allowed the Masaai people to inhabit the land around the crater. This obviously has lead to severe inbreeding and the lion population has gone down from about 100 to 45. The hotels around the crater rim are responsible for the lowering of the water level in the lake A well-fed hyena and this is leading to a slow death of the small forested area in the crater. Rhinos anywhere give a headache to the authorities, but when you have just 15 (all that the entire country has) living in the crater depending heavily on the depleting forest, they make solving the lion’s problem seem like a stroll in the park. The elephants face a different kind of problem – lack of mates. For some strange reason, the crater’s entire population of pachyderms is comprised of the bulls. In addition to the above, when we visited the place, the authorities had a new crisis to handle – in the form of a buffalo epidemic. For reasons still unknown then, the buffalos in the crater were dying in large numbers due to what looked like a skin disease. There were fresh carcasses every day, scavengers everywhere. Whatever it was that was killing these buffalos, fortunately, didn’t seem to affect the other animals. Hyenas, one of the well fed scavengers of the crater, are normally found lying around in puddles. The reason they do that is to cool their bodies; mainly to dissipate the heat generated by the high metabolic rates. The high metabolism is prescribed by their eating habits – a direct result of filling their stomach with bones and other hard-to-digest matters.

Endangered ones: The Black RhinosThe Tanzanian government, the park rangers to be precise, should be complimented for taking care of the 15 rhinos in the park. I don’t think any other set of people can show better dedication or commitment than these wonderful rangers. A park ranger does a head count of all the rhinos every morning and a ranger along with a couple of Masaai helpers spends every night down in the crater next to the rhinos just to make sure that the poachers are kept away from those USD15 million horns – yes, that is how much I am told the horns are worth! Not only are the number of visitors and the visiting hours strictly kept under control, but their journey in the crater is also kept under strict vigilance by park rangers who keep peering through their powerful binoculars all day, sitting in the huts along the slopes of the crater.

A rare sight: A hippo out of waterThe lake at the bottom is filled with pink flamingos and hippos. Hippos, I am told, are responsible for more deaths than any other creature in Tanzania. They, with their powerful jaws and big bodies, have overturned, sunk and broken innumerable boats in the lakes and rivers of Tanzania. Evens lions keep their distance from these huge animals. Crater is also a good place to witness the famed ‘queue’ of wildebeests, which come to the lake in this seemingly never ending line everyday to quench their thirst. We were also very fortunate to witness a kill in the crater. We saw a hapless zebra falling a victim to a hungry lioness. But the pick of the Safari in the crater was spotting 6 of the 15 rhinos of the crater.

Ngorongoro crater is also the coldest of the 4 parks in northern Tanzania. The rim is at an elevation of 2000m and in case you are camping there, I would advice you carry enough warm clothing. Ngorongoro is strategically situated in between civilization and the great Serengeti plains. The location becomes more important when you consider that every vehicle going to Serengeti must pass through Ngorongoro and hence pay the entrance fees. Crater, therefore, ends up getting paid twice!

Manoj Radhakrishnan

2008

http://www.travel-notes.org/ngorongoro.html

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This article is written by Manoj Radhakrishnan , an engineer and a travel photographer & writer based in Pune

Serengeti has to be one of the greatest national parks in the world. Roughly the size of Holland at 15, 000 km, the park gets its name from the Masai word Serenget meaning ‘endless plains’. One glimpse of the park and you won’t ask why it has been named so. As soon as you reach the outskirts of the park, you are greeted with a sight of miles and miles of endless African savannahs filled with wild animals. It is this place which draws thousands from all over the world to witness the much acclaimed migration of the wildebeest – said to be one of the most fascinating sights in the world.

The park is the best place in the world to see four out of the ‘big five’. The ‘big five’, for the uninitiated, are the lion, the leopard, the buffalo, the rhino and the elephant. Rhinos are the only one of the five that is missing , although some claim to have spotted a couple in a corner of the park. We were fortunate enough to see rest of the four in close quarters. The park has lots of lions and we bumped into a pride almost every time we took a game drive. Lions are the biggest cat in Africa and the only cat bigger than them in the world is the tiger. A lot of research is being carried out here and at the crater on these animals. Invariably every single pride had a lion with a tracking device strapped around its neck. One of the few recent discoveries of the research is establishing the fact that these cats are territorial. The crater in fact has been divided among six different prides and they guard their regions vehemently. We also spotted a lion-lioness couple near the famed Kopje rocks close to the park entrance. When they mate, the couple distance themselves from the pride and live ‘together’ for about a week. The highlight of the game drives in the park, for me at least, was watching a few playful lion cubs for about 3 hrs one evening.

The leopard must be the toughest to spot among the ‘big five’. Its numbers are very much lower than the other cats. A park as big as Serengeti has only about 50 of them. But unlike the rhinos, their small number is more due to nature’s hand than man’s. The leopard, unlike the other carnivores, kills its prey even when it is not hungry. It normally places its kill up the top of a tree far from most scavengers. In fact it is very normal to spot dead impalas and gazelles hanging from trees inhabited by these cats. In order to maintain the balance, nature tries to keep its strength to a small number. Nature does this by placing the leopard amongst the few mammals which does not care about its cubs. Its cubs face more danger from the carnivores than the cubs of the other cats.

The cheetah, of which there are only 500 in the park, is the most shy of all cats and the cat with the faintest of heart. A cheetah can easily be scared away from its meal by a tiny hyena and it is this reason why this animal, though fastest in the world, does not figure in the list of ‘big five’. The ‘big five’ consists of animals which are the most ferocious when attacked and hence the most sought after by the hunters. Hence the rarest rare sight that we enjoyed during our safari was spotting a cheetah, a hyena and a leopard in one spot. A cheetah very rarely stays put in such a ‘hostile’ environment.

The park also houses plenty of herbivores. After seeing a gazelle, an impala, a zebra or an antelope in every square feet of the park, I was surprised to learn that the chances of them getting killed by a carnivore is much higher then them dying a natural death. Each cat has its favourite prey and hence each herbivore has its deadliest enemy. The thomson’s gazelle is the fastest of all herbivores. At 60 mph, it can easily outrun all the cats except of course the cheetah. The park has wide varieties of antelopes from the dikdik, the smallest antelope in the world, to the eland, the biggest. Dikdiks are actually captured alive by the lions and they use the poor antelopes to teach their cubs the art of hunting.

A young dikdik at Serengeti

The park also has a few hippo pools and a crocodile pool. The crocodiles, I was told, can survive upto 2 years without food. They are seen to swallow stones during the extended famine. They regurgitate the stones once the food becomes available. Among the birds there are the ostriches – the biggest bird, the kori bustard – the biggest flying bird, the vultures, the eagles, the kites and the crowned crane – the national bird of Uganda.

A Kori Bustard at Serengeti

Among the lesser sought after creatures in the wild are the insects and the tse-tse has to be the most painful of the lot. They are about twice as big as a housefly and their bite sting twice as worse as mosquitos. But unlike the mosquitoes they do not leave behind a bad itch or swelling. The normal insect repellents didn’t seem to scare them away. The only consolation we had was the knowledge that the ones in north Tanzania don’t carry the sleeping sickness. One has to be more careful when visiting the Selous in the south.

A giraffe crossing a road at The Serengeti National Park

The camping in this park, unlike the smaller ones, is generally inside its boundaries. Sleeping in the wild with constant growling of the lions and munching of the giraffes and buffalos must be an experience of one’s lifetime. Giraffe’s munching rather than the lion’s grunts actually gave some of us sleepless nights as we were afraid that they might trip on the tent ropes. You don’t want to get anywhere close to their legs. They can kill a lion with their powerful forelimbs. The park will make it to anyone’s list of top 5 natural wonders of the world. I don’t think there are that many places in the world where you would be shooing away hyenas and lions during dinner time!

Manoj Radhakrishnan

2010

http://www.travel-notes.org/serengeti.html

Average Rating: 4.5 out of 5 based on 279 user reviews.

An entertainer dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean poses for a photo with an Indian tourist outside the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles

In India, May is the cruelest month. The short spring is already a distant memory, and the heat- and dust-quelling monsoon rains are still weeks away. There’s no better time for Indians to take to the road.

All told, some 550 million Indians travel to other parts of the country each year. Once school lets out for the summer, many families set off on annual visits to grandparents in their native town or village. Another 12 million Indians choose to fly overseas. Wealthy families from Punjab and Gujarat, in the north and west of India, respectively, flock to cosmopolitan meccas like Switzerland or Dubai, where women can indulge in brand-name shopping and don the revealing, Western-style fashions they don’t dare flaunt back home.

But while more than half a billion Indians take a holiday each year, the appeal of travel has traditionally been less about exploring someplace new than about simply getting out of town. Many Bengali families in the eastern corner of the country, for instance, escape north in the summer to the cooler Himalayas — an unfamiliar land and landscape. But they typically join large tour groups, interacting almost exclusively with other Bengalis and eating only Bengali-style meals.

There is, however, a quickly growing segment of Indian travelers — mostly young, rich and hailing from India’s larger cities — who are decidedly more adventure-seeking. Unlike their parents, they visit uncommon places and pursue unconventional activities — a safari in Tanzania, a ruins tour of Turkey, an F1 race in Singapore — with an interest and curiosity about other cultures that previous generations may not have had.

It is still a small proportion of Indian travelers who are so venturesome — but, by the numbers, even a small proportion qualifies as a mass movement, globally speaking. So it is no surprise that the travel industry has taken note. From New Zealand to Namibia, government tourist boards have designed campaigns specifically to woo Indian travelers, and luxury-tour purveyors like Cox & Kings and Kuoni, both based in Britain, advertise hard for Indian rupees. Kuoni, for instance, has joined hands with fabled Bollywood production house Yash Raj Films to offer the “Enchanted Journey” tour of movie locations, letting travelers ski the Alps or boat on Lake Zurich in the footsteps of their favorite stars.

In February came another nod to the Indian traveler’s increasing clout: international travel-guide leader Lonely Planet launched an Indian version of its eponymous monthly travel magazine (other editions of the magazine are published in the U.K. and Brazil). And in October, the bible of luxury travel, Condé Nast Traveler, has plans to follow with an Indian edition, building on the established successes of the publisher’s Indian versions of Vogue and GQ.

The target readers of the new magazines are Indians who are traveling more and traveling differently — many as singles or couples without children or parents in tow. “You’ll be surprised by how many married women there are traveling without husbands and single women traveling with girlfriends, ” says Sumitra Senapaty, 49, a travel writer who has run Women on Wanderlust, a travel club for women, since 2005 and has watched her business grow many times over. “I quite struggled with it initially, ” she says. “I didn’t have the pocket to advertise, so everybody’s mother, friend, aunt and sister spread the word. I just wanted women to come onboard.” Today, Senapaty’s tours — which usher female travelers to hard-to-reach places like Ladakh, a high mountain desert in the Himalayan foothills — are usually sold out.

In addition to seeking girlfriend globetrotters, the industry is going after the growing number of travelers who embark on longer, activity-driven trips and seek novel experiences, rather than just another jaunt to the hotel pool. More and more, Indian travelers are going deep-sea diving in Australia, for instance, and booking yoga retreats in the Himalayas. “There are more people choosing adventure travel over conventional holidays, ” says Vaibhav Kala, who runs Delhi-based Aquaterra Adventures and arranges trips for more than 3, 000 customers per year. “Since four or five years ago, our clientele has turned on its head. From catering to largely inbound foreign tourists, we’re now catering to mostly Indian travelers.”

But catering to Indian travelers means catering to certain Indian preferences and peculiarities, no matter how far-flung or exotic the vacation. Lonely Planet Magazine India always gives readers the requisite practical information about obtaining visas and finding consulates overseas, but it also has a section called Fancy a Curry? that locates Indian restaurants and vegetarian options in foreign cities. “Indians are getting a bit more adventurous, but we still need a little hand-holding, ” says Vardhan Kondvikar, editor of Lonely Planet Magazine India. “We’re a bit like Nemo right now — the big world outside is very exciting, but we still need the anemones nearby for security.”

The worldview of the Indian traveler strongly influences the editorial choices that the magazine’s staff make, Kondvikar says. For instance, the magazine tends to highlight mainstream tourist destinations — which are perhaps familiar to world-weary travelers but new to the Indian populace. The tone of the magazine is also much more introductory, friendly and informative than that of its British and Brazilian counterparts. Recent feature stories introduced readers to Rome, Vietnam, Los Angeles and Puducherry in peninsular India; another popular article covered five weekend getaways from several major Indian cities. “[The U.K.] magazine was designed for experienced travelers who want to see the unexplored sides of places they’ve already been. So it has a lot of stories that bypass traditional tourist sites and find hidden alleys and restaurants, ” says Kondvikar. “We couldn’t do too much of that — many Indians are only going to the major destinations for the first time, and we didn’t want to ignore them.”

The travel lust of this budding demographic has largely survived the global recession, which has otherwise diminished international travel overall. In fact, a stronger rupee has seen more Indians traveling abroad, especially to long-haul destinations. The U.N.’s Madrid-based World Tourism Organization estimates that by 2020, some 50 million Indians will be taking foreign holidays each year.

So while Lonely Planet and Condé Nast may be wading into a shaky market already cluttered with dozens of travel titles, they have high expectations for success. “[In terms of] advertising revenues, not only have we dominated market share in the categories we operate in but also we are growing at an exponential rate, ” says Alex Kuruvilla, managing director of Condé Nast India. “So we are very bullish on the opportunity.” If the rupee continues to rise, this May might not end up being so cruel after all.

Madhur Singh
2010
http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0, 31542, 1989633, 00.html

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