Serengeti or Ngorongoro Crater: what is the difference?

Serengeti National Park is a national park: human settlement and livestock grazing are not permitted inside it.

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is not a national park. It is a multiple-use area where Maasai communities live and graze livestock alongside wildlife — an arrangement that is unusual and is a large part of what makes the place what it is. The crater sits inside that wider conservation area; it is not the whole of it.

Both are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The Serengeti is very large — roughly 15,000 square kilometres — and the crater floor is very small by comparison, on the order of 250 to 300 square kilometres, enclosed by walls several hundred metres high.

That difference sets the shape of a visit. In the Serengeti you cover distance and the day is about searching: what you find is not guaranteed and the space is part of the experience. On the crater floor you are working a small, enclosed area with a high concentration of animals in it.

Time on the crater floor is also capped, so a crater visit is usually a half-day — descend early, come back up in the early afternoon — rather than a full day. The Serengeti rewards several days.

The crater holds a high density of resident wildlife year-round, because it has permanent water and grazing. It is one of the better places in Tanzania to see black rhino, though sightings are often at distance and are never guaranteed. Large herds of buffalo, zebra and wildebeest are usually present, along with lion, spotted hyena and flamingo on the soda lake when conditions suit them.

The crater's wildlife is largely resident. The great migration does not pass through the crater floor — it moves across the plains further north and west, some of which lie within the wider conservation area.

The Serengeti offers the migration, better cheetah viewing on the open plains, leopard in the riverine woodland around Seronera, and the scale that the crater by definition cannot.

Because the crater floor is small and access is limited to a set window, vehicles concentrate. A good sighting there will usually be shared. The Serengeti disperses vehicles across a far larger area, though the well-known parts of Seronera get busy in peak months.

Park and conservation fees are set by the Tanzanian government, are charged separately for each area, and change from time to time. The crater carries its own vehicle fee on top of the conservation area fee, which is why a single crater day is not a cheap day.

If you have one day, the crater gives the most wildlife per hour of anywhere in the region, and it is genuinely spectacular to descend into.

If you have three days or more, the Serengeti is the stronger choice, and it is the only one of the two where the migration is in play.

If you have four days or more, doing both is the standard northern circuit for good reason: they are an easy drive apart and they show you two different things rather than the same thing twice.