The route starts at Loduare Gate and leads to Olkarien Gorge near the Serengeti border, offering a unique safari where Earth’s history meets human history in stunning landscapes.
The route begins from the south entrance of Ngorongoro-Lengai Geopark at Loduare Gate to reach the base of the Gol Mountains at Olkarien Gorge geosite, close to the border of Serengeti. This is a unique safari experience in which the Earth history intimately linked with the human history inside wonderful and unique landscapes. The safari that will take you back to millions of years of volcanic eruption, creation of calderas, and then the life of our ancestors on Serengeti Plain at Olduvai Gorge and its surroundings. You will end your safari on the ancient land that dominated with hills and inselbergs which the early human used to extract the stone tools. It is within these hills where Nasera Rock and Olkarien Gorge are located. Mancala “Bao” board, the traditional play, has been played on the stones for long time in this area. Apart of the Olduvai Gorge, Serengeti Plain also host the number of amazing geosites including the wandering sand dunes. Some of the sand dunes are moving so they are famously known as Shifting Sands.
The Highland is the series of nine volcanic peaks and depressions confined between two East Africa Rift Valley branches, Eyasi and Gregory Rifts. The highland mountainous trending north to south about 80km from Oldeani Mountain to Oldoinyo Lengai.
The formation of NVH was associated with tectonic activities. The Eyasi-Wembele faulting phase initiate series of volcanic activities (Ma – present) in Ngorongoro region. Seven volcanic vents built the second phase of faulting (about 2Ma), Natron-Manyara rift, associated with collapse of the volcanoes to create calderas of Ngorongoro, Olmoti, and Embakaai, Eruptions was overlapping and the vents were topography of the area but also providing pyroclastic relatively close such that, the lava flow was materials on Laetoli and Olduvai Gorge restricted and the cones grow around each vent archaeological sites where hominin and stone tools expanded and met.
Later the lavas became more viscous and did not flow far from vents. The height of the cones increased gradually until the active summit exceeds the heights that they possess today.
The second phase of faulting (about 2Ma), Natron-Manyara rift, associated with collapse of the volcanoes to create calderas of Ngorongoro, Olmoti, and Embakaai, as well as built of Kerimasi and Ol Doinyo Lengai volcanoes, faults and small volcanos and craters.
The NVH play significant role not only changing the topography of the area but also providing pyroclastic materials on Laetoli and Olduvai Gorge archaeological sites where hominin and stone tools discovered.
Loduare Gate is the main entry gate for both the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and the Ngorongoro Lengai Geopark. It offers an interpretive centre with numerous displays depicting the dramatic geology, ecology and ethnography of the region.
There is also a small shop in the centre, which sells food and drinks, as well as guidebooks and local products. Information on the Geopark can be found on a wall panel, which shows a map of the park, along with routes and stops.
Be sure to study the large three-dimensional topographic model of the region and see if you can find the Geopark North Route on it.
On any given day, the Loduare Gate may be home to a large tribe of baboons. Visitors should beware of the baboons, as they are used to humans and aggressively seek out food.
Ngorongoro Crater, one of the great natural wonders of the world, is a caldera resulting from the collapse of Ngorongoro Volcano approximately 2.5Ma. The caldera is roughly circular with a diameter of slightly more than 19 km (about 12 miles), making it the World’s largest intact collapse caldera. The crater floor lies at an elevation of around 1700 meters above sea level (5580 feet) while the rim varies from 2100 to 2400 meters (approximately 6900 to 7900 feet). In the centre of the caldera lies Lake Magadi, a shallow saline lake.
It is estimated that prior to collapse, the volcano may have reached an elevation of somewhere between 4,500 and 5,800 meters (14,800 to 19,000 feet), putting it on a par with Mt. Meru and perhaps even Mt. Kilimanjaro.
The crater is host to approximately 30,000 animals, including elephants, cape buffalos, hippos, black rhinos, lions, giraffe, wildebeest and gazelles. Lake Magadi is host to an unusually large number of flamingos.
This stone monument marks the resting place of renowned German zoologist and conservationist Bernhard Klemens Maria Grzimek (1909-1987) and his son Michael Grimek (1935-1959). Their most significant works were the book and subsequent film titled Serengeti Shall Not Die.
Both lead to the establishment of Serengeti National Park. Michael was unfortunately killed in an air crash during filming. The film won an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1959.
The rim forest is a dream come true for botanists! Dense evergreen forests cover the steep slopes of east side of the crater, which receives rainfall year-round.
The most common trees present are Strangler Figs, tall Pillar woods, Nuxias with their distinctly fluted trunks, broad-leaved Crotons and Peacock Flower trees, also known as Albizzias.
These giant trees almost form a canopy and many are covered in ferns, lichens and mosses. This dense rim forest exists in stark contrast to the crater basin which is characterized by open short grass plains.
The rim forest is home to baboons and leopards, and offers excellent opportunities for bird watching. Birds of prey, as well as hummingbird-like Sunbirds and colourful frill- topped Livingstone’s Turacos, are common in the area.
This beautiful scenery shape-like crater located on south limb of Serengeti plains formed on the outward slopes of Ngorongoro Mountain to the east and Sadiman Mountain to the southwest, while to the north bound with the scarp of the northeast trending fault.
The depression is the result of the fault rifting which cause the movement of the land toward the west leaving the most eastern part depressed.
Because the floor of the depression is covered with short grass, it is considered by many to be an extension of the Serengeti Plains. The depression is important to the local Maasai. The grasses provide grazing for livestock and a large freshwater spring along the southern margin provides water for humans and animals alike.
The Maasai village houses (Boma) beautify the area and provide cultural experiences to the visitors that you will live with. In the depression, man and livestock live symbiotically with wildlife.
This stop offers a view of the southern rim of Ngorongoro Crater. In contrast to the eastern rim, vegetation is sparse here and dominated by the succulent Candelabra tree (Euphorbia candelabrum), which commonly grows in drier areas of the East African Rift system.
The Candelabra tree has many thick, upward-pointing branches that extend typically 3 meters before re-branching to form a large, broadly-rounded crown.
The tree grows up to 12 meters tall and will exude a poisonous white latex if injured.
The Seneto Cultural Boma was started in 1992 and is the oldest of five cultural bomas belonging to the Maasai in the Geopark. Cultural bomas were established to enable local communities to participate in geotourism by providing centres where visitors can learn about the Maasai way of life. Seneto Boma is sponsored by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority and the Ngorongoro Pastoralist Council.
The boma is under the Ngorongoro ward, which includes three villages – Oloirobi, Kayapsi and Misigyo. Occupation and management of the boma rotates through the three villages, with each village staying for one year.
At cultural bomas, visitors are able to see how the Maasai live, taste the food they eat, enter their houses, participate in their dances, listen to their folktales and buy their wares. Each car that brings visitors pays an entrance fee, which goes into the boma’s basket fund. The money collected is used for several purposes. Some of the fund’s help support the members staying in the boma. Other funds help with the purchase of cattle, while a small percentage goes to the entire village.
The famous Serengeti Plains can be seen in the distance. These vast plains are a fairly young geologic feature, formed by the ongoing accumulation of volcanic ash erupted from two volcanoes, Kerimasi (now extinct), and the still active Ol Doinyo Lengai. Both are located in the northwestern part of the Ngorongoro Volcanic Highlands.
On a clear day, Olduvai Gorge is visible in the forefront along the eastern edge of the plains. By far, the hills of the Gol Mountains that form part of Mozambique Belt rocks can be seen, including the two hills, which are near the Olduvai Gorge that used as source of stone tools during stone tool ages. To the east of the gorge is the Olbalbal Depression, which collects water from the gorge during rainy periods. The depression usually contains a small lake in its centre.
Olduvai Gorge is the most famous archaeological site in East Africa and, perhaps, the world. In 1979 it was named a World Heritage Site. For some 3 million years prior to the formation of the gorge, the region was a low area periodically occupied by a large, saline lake known as Lake Olduvai. Explosive volcanic eruptions from the Ngorongoro Volcanic Highlands to the south and east generated vast amounts of volcanic ash and pumice (proclastic material) that accumulated in and around the lake. During this time, the lake and surrounding areas were home to some of our earliest hominid ancestors. Formation of the gorge began around 30,000 years ago, when tectonic activity associated with the East African Rift led to the formation of the Olbalbal Depression to the east. This permitted an existing river system, that originated from Lake Ndutu to the west, to begin aggressively cutting down through the numerous layers of volcanic ash and pumice, thereby creating the gorge. At its deepest point, Olduvai Gorge is almost 100 meters (328 feet) deep.
Exposed within the sides of the gorge is a remarkably rich chronicle of human ancestry and the evolution of the Serengeti ecosystem. It was here that Mary and Louis Leakey, over the course of more than 30 years of painstaking work, unearthed the first well-dated fossils and artifacts of some of some of our earliest human ancestors. Their finds include the famous Zinjanthropus (Australopithecus boisei) skull, as well as remains of Homo habilis, the presumed maker of the numerous early stone tools found in deposits ranging in age from 1.6 to 1.8 million years ago, and Homo erectus, the larger- bodied and larger- brained hominin that preceded the earliest modern humans (Homo sapiens).
Some of excavation sites have been preserved for public viewing and present-day work continues during the dry seasons, coordinated by the Tanzanian Department of Antiquities. The gorge may be visited year-round. It is necessary to have an official guide to visit the actual excavations. Near the entrance to Olduvai Gorge is a new museum developed by the Geopark and completed in 2017. The museum includes extensive archaeological and cultural exhibits. It also houses a stunning sheltered viewing area of the gorge, used for lectures and talks, as well as a shop in which one can purchase local products and books, along with a restaurant, a community centre and restrooms.
During the years that the Leakey Family conducted their research in Olduvai Gorge, they established two different base camps. The first camp was located on the northern side of the gorge. After several years, the camp was relocated to its current site, which is just west of the convergence of the main and southern branches of the gorge. Most of the buildings here date back to the 1960s and include an outdoor dining room, several tin-roofed research buildings and Mary Leakey’s cabin.
The Leakey Camp has been recently been turned into a museum by the Geopark to preserve and highlight the conditions under which the Leakey’s conducted their research. The Geopark continues to add furniture and other pieces used by the Leakey’s to the museum so that visitors can get a better appreciation for the times during which the Leakey’s worked in the area. The more modern buildings visible to the left as one enters the camp have been constructed by various research groups and are actively used by researchers from all over the world.
The Soitoo Quartzite Hills are a pair of prominent hills just to the north of Olduvai Gorge. The word Soitoo is the Maasai word for “rock”. The hills are composed of multiple layers of beautiful quartzite that varies in colour from white to green. The quartzite is strongly jointed and fractured.
The hills are erosional remnants, called inselbergs, derived from a much larger expanse of very old (500Ma) basement metamorphic rocks. To the south, similar rocks lie buried beneath the much younger (3-1 Ma) Olduvai sediments. To the north, they form the prominent north-south trending Gol Mountains.
Shifting Sands is one of the unique sites in Ngorongoro Lengai Geopark. The crescent-shaped feature is called a barchan sand dune. It stands approximately 5m tall and measures 100 m (328 ft) long along its curve. What makes it unique is that it occurs as a single, isolated dune. Usually, such dunes are present in large dune fields.
The dark colour of the sand is due to the presence of iron-rich minerals. If you have a magnet with you, stick it into the sand. You will see that it attracts numerous small grains of a black mineral called magnetite.
The source of the dark minerals is a thin layer of ash that covers the surrounding flat plain. The ash itself was erupted from Ol Doinyo Lengai Volcano several thousand years ago. Steady winds blowing from east to west have scoured lighter portions of the ash from the area, leaving behind the heavier dark coloured iron-rich minerals that formed the dune. During a single year, the dune moves westward at an average of 17 meters per year (~4.7 cm per day). The dune kills vegetation and insects in its path. Numerous exoskeletons of beetles can be found on the dune.
This stop is atop a small inselberg similar in age and origin to the Soitoo Quartzite Hills. Here you will find the same white to green quartzite, as well as a more complicated metamorphic rock called gneiss. It consists of pink feldspar, shiny white mica, and milky white quartz crystals. On the north side of the outcrop, two parallel rows of circular indentations can be found that were carved into the gneiss by local people. This is a “board” for a game called Bao (Swahili for “board”).
The game is a traditional mancala board game played throughout East Africa, as well as in some areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. Bao is played by two people, one player on each side. The board has 32 holes arranged in four rows. At the beginning of the game, two small objects, such as seeds, stones or wood, are placed in each hole. Moves by the players are made by taking one or more seeds and ‘sowing’ them along the row of holes. The object of the game is capture all of the other player’s seeds. The age of this particular Bao board is unknown, but it is believed to be quite old.
Nasera Rock is a spectacular, 50 meter (165 feet) high inselberg located in the southwestern part of the Gol Mountains. These rocks are the same age as those present in the Soitoo Hills and the Bao Site (859-500 mya). Look carefully at the exposed walls. One can see a light-coloured rock that appears to have a semi-vertical layering to it. A pink-coloured rock cuts across the layering of the light-coloured rock in many places.
The light-coloured rock is a metamorphic gneiss into which molten granitic magma was injected and then cooled to form a pink granite. The injected granite is known as a pegmatite. Large crystals of pink feldspar, mica and quartz are readily visible in the granite. It may be hard to imagine, but all of this occurred several tens of kilometres deep within the crust. Hundreds of millions of years of subsequent erosion have eventually brought these rocks to the surface.
The final stages of erosion that formed the inselberg also created shallow caves at its base. Within these caves can be found evidence of occupation by early modern humans, dating back to 30,000 years ago, including stone artifacts, bone fragments and pottery sherds.
The north-south trending Gol Mountains are the result of predominantly north-south faulting
associated with the on-going formation of the East African Rift. However, in the southern part of the mountains, two prominent east-west faults have created a long, linear fault-bounded valley called a graben.
The fault on the north side of the graben (on the left as you look east) is the Angatakiti fault. The fault on the south side of the graben is unnamed. This stop provides a panoramic view that extends all the way to the head of the Olkarien Gorge, seen later at Stop 18.
The rocks that are exposed in these hills in Emugur Village are granitoids that consist of large crystals of biotite, feldspar and quartz. Several irregular veins of light-coloured granite have been intruded into the granitoids. These rocks are of the same age as those found in Nasera Rock and the Gol Mountains.
The Gol Mountains are an example of a fault-bounded mountain range. Until around 1 million years ago, the western edge of the East African Rift Zone was located where you are standing. Continuous faulting lowered the rocks to the east, leaving the rocks to the west to form the mountains. The prominent rock face you see to the west marks the location of the fault. In this part of the Gol Mountains, the rocks consist of highly-fractured metamorphic quartzite (859-500 mya), virtually identical to that seen in the Soitoo Hills (Stop 12).
The Olkarien Gorge is a deep, extremely narrow, east-west trending canyon that slices through the quartzite rocks on the east side of the Gol Mountains. The gorge is 8 km (5 miles) in length. The walls are vertical and, in some areas, they even overhang the gorge. The origin of the gorge goes back to the time when the Gol Mountains were being formed. As faulting continuously lowered the land to the east, an existing stream slowly cut down through the higher elevation rocks to the west to keep pace with the lowering land surface.
The Olkarien Gorge is rich in both geological and cultural features. A short way up the gorge are the Maasai Cultural Wells. Much of the Geopark is characterized by a semi-arid climate. Consequently, most rivers are seasonal and it is hard to find water for livestock and humans during the dry seasons.
However, many such rivers have sandy beds with shallow aquifers beneath them. The Maasai have dug
shallow wells to access the water as a means of source survival. This water source is strictly regulated by community elders and fines are charged to those who break the rules or use wells that do not belong to them.
Further up the gorge a natural stone bridge can be seen. The bridge was formed when a large rock fell from the top of the gorge and became stuck between the narrowing walls. This part of the gorge is unsafe for walking as it contains several hanging rocks and unstable walls. It is important strictly follow your guide’s recommendations.
Looking upwards towards the sky, you may see one or more large birds riding the air currents. These are Ruppell’s griffon vultures (Gryps rueppelli), for which the gorge is an important nesting site. The vultures are named in honour of Eduard Ruppell, a 19th-century German explorer, collector, and zoologist. Ruppell’s vultures are large birds. Adults can be nearly a meter (3.2 feet) long, with a wingspan of 2.3 to 2.6 meters (7.5 to 8.5 feet). Their weight ranges from 6.4 to 9 kg. A notorious scavenger, Rüppell’s vultures dine exclusively on carrion, the decaying flesh of dead animals.
They rely on vision alone to detect prey. When a vulture spots a carcass from the air, it will swoop down nearby and run with its wings spread and neck extended towards its meal. It then inserts its heads under the skin of the carcass, sometimes climbing inside the ribcage to feed. The vulture’s head and neck are devoid of most feathers, evolved to keep the mess of blood and meat to a minimum. Rüppell’s griffon vulture is considered to be the highest-flying bird on Earth, with a confirmed flight at an altitude of 11,300 meters above sea level.
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