Helicopters are awe-inspiring – there is simply no other way to put it. For me, the more time up in the skies, flying amongst the birds, the better. It gives a perspective and a view of the world that is otherwise impossible, along with an incredible sense of place. Join me on a visual feast of some of my favourite aerial shots taken along this flight path...
Staying at the beautiful Mwiba Lodge, near to the Maswa Game Reserve, we used this location as a literal launchpad to explore one of the most iconic parts of Tanzania.
This rough and simplistic map above shows the route we flew in an anticlockwise direction. The starting and endpoint being Mwiba River Lodge, marked with the blue dot.
This area has such rich and diverse geography; from its location along the Great Rift Valley to the volcanoes and craters, the salt lakes, the open plains, the deep erosion gullies, the impressive protruding koppies, and the vast tracts of untouched, and inaccessible, wilderness.
Looking north along the escarpment, we flew over waterfalls, gorges, and thick forested ravines. This area is vast, largely unoccupied, super remote and breathtakingly gorgeous.
Looking out towards the salt-rich Lake Eyasi you can see the area locals are using to dry salt. The brilliant array of colours is created through different salt concentrations and temperatures. Once this water dries off, it leaves salt which the local people collect and sell. Look closely and you can see a flock of Flamingoes flying over.
A lone fisherman on the banks of Lake Eyasi caught my eye. Leaving the lake we headed north up the escarpment and then cut west. Huge erosion gullies can be seen scattered across, forming the most gorgeous of patterns when viewed from above.
We arrived at the endless open plains of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. There can be few massive, open grasslands, such as this left in Africa.
We managed to catch up with the wildebeest migration. Long lines of wildebeest slowly, but steadily, moving northwards. Almost all females, with a baby in tow.
Traditional Maasai ‘Manyattas.’ A method of traditional housing in which the livestock is secured overnight in the centre of all the huts – reducing predation of the livestock by lions, leopards, hyenas and jackals
The Olduvai Gorge is without a doubt one of the most important paleoanthropological sites in the world. It was here that Mary and Louis Leakey made numerous crucial discoveries, pivotal in understanding the development and social complexities of the earliest humans, or hominins.
Gaining altitude fast we passed by the famous Ngorongoro Crater, seeing a few sparsely distributed communities.
One of the highlights, of a trip already packed with highlights, was Empakai Crater, a caved-in volcanic caldera. I simply could not believe the colours–the verdant greens and the brilliant blues.