The Last King of Africa

The corrugated gravel road known officially as Tanzania Route B144 provides a bone-jarring, teeth-rattling, bladder-testing connection between two of the great wonders of Africa. At its eastern end stands the massive green slopes of Ngorongoro Crater, a giant caldera, more than ten miles wide, formed by the collapse of one of the many extinct volcanos of the Great Rift Valley and home to more than 25,000 large mammals. To the west lays the vast plains of the Serengeti, our destination on a ...