&Beyond Ngorongoro Crater Lodge

The Ngorongoro Crater is a 20-kilometre-wide volcanic caldera, 600 metres deep, whose walls have kept 25,000 large mammals in permanent residence for thousands of years. The crater floor supports the highest density of lion in Africa and one of the continent’s last viable black rhino populations. Descending the rim road into the mist on a cold highland morning, with the crater floor appearing below through the cloud, is a sight that holds its power no matter how many times you’ve seen the photographs.

&Beyond’s lodge on the southern rim doesn’t try to be subtle. Ngorongoro Crater Lodge is an act of deliberate extravagance: 25 individual bandas on the caldera wall, their design drawing on Maasai building traditions while incorporating beaded curtains, gilt mirrors, carved wooden floors, and fireplaces against the highland cold. It is polarising. Some guests find it excessive; others find that nothing less would match the drama of the view from the picture windows. Standing at your suite at dawn, the morning mist lifting from the crater floor to reveal the landscape and its animals 600 metres below, is genuinely unlike anything you can see from another hotel room anywhere.

The game viewing is the crater’s main argument, and it is a strong one. All of the Big Five are present every day on the crater floor. The Big Five checklist that elsewhere in Africa requires days of searching and considerable luck can be completed in a single morning here. Black rhino sightings, extended, unhurried views of one of Africa’s most endangered animals, are routine. The lion prides on the open short-grass plains have been studied continuously for decades and are highly visible.

The crater descents are shared with other operators, which means vehicles at the water holes. That’s the trade-off for the reliability. Rim walks through the Afromontane forest provide colobus monkeys and forest birds at a completely different pace. Olduvai Gorge is 45 kilometres west, where some of the earliest evidence of human evolution was excavated, a half day excursion worth adding to any itinerary.