Day 227 - Crater Rim View - where you can't view the crater's rim

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A romantic start to the day with Ed making Gemma Heinz Baked Beans on toast on the campfire - the tradition of cooking a meal on 14th Feb continues even when we're camping. A slow morning with a visit to the snake park again to see them a lot more active: a Green Mamba shedding its skin; lots of scary movement when we put our faces to the glass; a gecko-shaped bulge being digested inside one snake. But the undoubted highlight was the realisation that even tortoises know it's Valentine's Day. One tortoise was certainly in amorous mood and we captured the whole thing with movie footage. Including sound. We'll be showing this clip off when people come round for dinner for years to come. We finished things off watching a couple of white mice cosily asleep on top of a curled up Python. We hope they got to enjoy what was no doubt their final chance at sleeping in this world.

Next door was a rather impressive Masai museum - the Masai are the tribe who originally came from around this part of Africa and whose blankets will be vying with those we picked up in Mexico for pride of place on our guest bedroom's bed.

At 2:50pm our 2pm pickup arrived - a minibus that was apparently going to take us into the Ngorongoro crater the following day. We were driven to a village called Karatu and to a place called 'Crater View Inn'. Ed asked where the crater was and was taken across the road where the guide craned his neck, thought about it a bit and then said "Over there somewhere". This was not the rim of the crater that we had been promised so we kicked up a bit of a fuss and were given a list of reasons why what we wanted was actually impossible, rather than just being something the tour company didn't want to give us. Just as we'd given up hope and had resigned ourselves to effectively camping in someone's back garden they miraculously found that we could travel to meet up with the rest of our group at the crater's rim after all. We raced to get to the national park's gate before it shut, including getting on 2 wheels going around a bend that had been visible for half a mile.

We stopped off at the most incredible viewpoint looking down 600m into the crater, and eventually met up with our friends. Gemma needed a bit of consoling and this came in the form of a present from Karen - a sticker saying "I love Cheetahs"! We ate dinner around the campfire, making it clear that any guitar that appeared would be burnt, as would anyone singing Kum Ba Yah. Then our fun was interrupted by a bush pig being killed by hyena 10m away. Not quite a lion slaying a rhino but good to be close to anyway. Then we all carefully went to our tents, avoiding the buffalo grazing next to them.

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