Empakaai Crater, Laetoli, Oldoinyo Lengai and Olduvai Gorge
Empakaai Crater
While lake-filled Empakaai Crater, located 23 km northeast of Olmoti Crater, is not as well-known as Ngorongoro, many tourists believe it to be just as beautiful. Encircled by steep-sided, forested cliffs at least 300m high, the lake fills the majority of the crater floor and attracts flamingos and other water birds. Hiking into the crater is an amazing experience, but the view from the rim of the crater is among the most beautiful in northern Tanzania. This is a terrific area for birdwatchers, and if you enjoy taking pictures, you might find some amazing shots here.
The saline crater on the eastern rim of the nearly 8km-diameter Empakaai Crater, which is the second-largest crater in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, dominates the floor. The Embulbul Depression, a grassy bowl that dips to below 2,350m at the base of the 3,260m Mount Losirua and 3,648m Lolmalasin (the highest point in the Crater Highlands), is approximately 90 minutes’ drive northeast of Ngorongoro Crater. It is one of East Africa’s most underappreciated and rarely visited scenic gems. Whether you look east across the Rift Valley to the ashen slopes and smoking fumaroles of volcanic Ol Doinyo Lengai, which also overlooks Lake Natron and snow-capped Kilimanjaro on a clear day, or inward to the emerald green crater lake, its shallows often tinted pink by thousands of flamingos, the view from the forested crater rim is breathtaking. Expect to descend to the lakeside in about 30 minutes, and then climb back up in about an hour. Walking around the lake takes at least four hours, but it is possible. It’s a great location that is well worth the trip.
Laetoli
The Plio-Pleistocene site of Laetoli in Tanzania is well-known for its human footprints that have been preserved in volcanic ash. In 1935, a man by the name of Sanimu persuaded archaeologist Louis Leakey to conduct research in the region, leading to the first recognition of Laetoli by western science. A 27-meter-long track of 3.7-million-year-old hominid footprints, most likely created by Australopithecus afarensis, may be found at isolated Laetoli, about 45 kilometres south of Oldupai Gorge. It is a very distant and evocative location that was found by Mary Leakey’s team in 1976 and excavated two years later. Only replicas of the prints are now on display at the site’s modest temporary museum, which is part of an EU-funded museum that is still being built. The prints’ cast copies are kept at the Oldupai Museum. Archaeologist Mary Leakey and her crew found the site and tracks in 1976, and by 1978, they had dug up the area. According to an examination of the footfall impressions, “The Laetoli Footprints” provide compelling proof of Pliocene human bipedalism and were widely acknowledged by both experts and the general public. Since 1998, more than a dozen additional hominin findings have been recovered and the palaeoecology has been fully reconstructed thanks to paleontological expeditions led by Terry Harrison of additional York University and Amandus Kwekason of the National Museum of Tanzania.
Hominin and animal skeleton remains were among the other finds unearthed at Laetoli along with the footprints. It was evident from an examination of the skeletal structure and footprints that hominins’ bigger brains came after bipedalism. The hominins that left the trace are difficult to identify at the species level; the most frequently suggested species is Australopithecus afarensis.
How to get there
Oldupai Museum and Laetoli are connected by a very rough, 4WD-only road that passes through Noorkisaruni Kopje and Endulen. On the southern side of Makarot, on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater, there is a much better road that leads from Kimba to Endulen. Laetoli is 9km from Endulen on either route.
Ol Doinyo Lengai
The active volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai, also known as the “Mountain of God” in Maasai, is situated in the Gregory Rift, south of Lake Natron, in Tanzania’s Arusha Region. It produces natrocarbonatite lava, which is unique to the East African Rift’s volcanic system. Following Ol Doinyo Lengai’s 1960 eruption, geological studies ultimately supported the theory that carbonatite rock is formed from magma. With a few minor ones in 1983, 1933, and 2007, the most recent larger eruption occurred in 1966.Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only volcano in the world that produces natrocarbonatite lava and one of the few that do not contain potassium or sodium carbonate.

About 500 to 600°C is the temperature of this lava, which has nearly no silicon and is not as hot as other lava. The majority of the most recent eruptions came from the northern crater of the volcano, which contains multiple active centres. Cones that are subsidiary spread out from the centre and along its sides. Citrus and vineyards are cultivated on the rich lower reaches of the Ol Doinyo Lengai. Oak, birch, and beech cover the steeper, higher slopes. A few plants can be discovered strewn among ashes, sand, and pieces of slag and lava above 6,500 feet. When natrocarbonatite lava comes into touch with moist substances, it turns white and resembles flowing black oil. When it rains, this whitening occurs practically instantly. There are two peak craters on the mountain. The southern one has volcanic ash and is dormant. The northern summit crater, which is more than 200 meters deep, is the active one. Climbers can ascend Mount Lengai to the summit and occasionally descend all the way to the crater, which is nearly filled with molten lava flows. In order to reach the summit in the morning, most climbs are planned after midnight. The views from Mount Lengai are breathtaking, despite the fact that the route is challenging due to the heat (40°C) and hikers are encouraged to exercise utmost caution. Views of Lake Natron can be seen in the north, the Great Rift Valley in the west, and Mount Kilimanjaro in the east.
Olduvai Gorge
One of the most significant paleoanthropological sites in the world, Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, also known as Oldupai Gorge, has been crucial in advancing our knowledge of early human evolution. Situated in the eastern Serengeti Plains within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in the Arusha Region, this 48-kilometer-long, steep-sided ravine is part of the Great Rift Valley, which spans East Africa. It is approximately 45 kilometres away from Laetoli, another significant archaeological site of early human occupation. Mary and Louis Leakey, a British-Kenyan paleoanthropologist-archaeologist duo, founded and expanded the excavation and research programs at Olduvai Gorge, which led to significant advancements in human knowledge and earned the site international recognition. Because of the abundance of East African wild sisal that grows across the canyon area, the gorge is named after the Maasai word Oldupai, which means “the place of the wild sisal.” Reaching a depth of 90 meters, the gorge slashes into Pleistocene lake bed deposits 25 kilometres downstream of Lake Ndutu and Lake Masek. The main gorge is joined by a subsidiary gorge 8 km from the mouth, which originates on Lemagrut Mountain. The shoreline of a prehistoric lake, which is abundant in fossils and early man sites, is followed by this side gorge. The fossils were preserved in the gorge because to periodic flows of volcanic ash from Olmoti and Kerimasi.
The site is important because it demonstrates the growing social and developmental complexity of the earliest humans, or hominins, which were primarily demonstrated by their usage and manufacture of stone tools. Evidence of hunting and scavenging before the invention of tools can be seen in the ratio of meat to plant matter in the early hominin diet, as well as in the presence of gnaw marks that appear before cut marks. An indication of growing social interaction and group activity is the gathering of tools and animal remains in one location. All of these elements point to an increase in cognitive abilities at the start of the time when hominids changed their appearance and behaviour to become hominins, or humans.
A modern australopithecine, Paranthropus boisei, arrived in Olduvai Gorge 1.8 million years ago (mya), followed by Homo erectus 1.2 mya. Homo habilis was likely the first early human species to inhabit the gorge. The site is dated to 17,000 years ago, when our species, Homo sapiens, first appeared, approximately 300,000 years ago.