Sanctuary Ngorongoro Crater Camp

Each of the 10 Classic Safari Tents is positioned on raised decking, offering guests an elevated view of the surrounding landscape. The bedrooms feature a large and comfortable king-size bed, adorned with soft linen and plush pillows. The room includes both indoor and outdoor seating, allowing guests to snuggle up and stay warm, or enjoy sitting out under the dazzling stars. Your en-suite bathroom will consist of a flush toilet and indoor bucket shower with hot water on demand. The bedrooms also include a range of amenities such as hairdryers and power points for keeping batteries charged.

Guests can look forward to three delicious meals each day at Sanctuary Ngorongoro Crater Camp. Each meal is presented in a buffet style, allowing guests to pick and choose their favourite options and craft a meal to suit them. Any dietary requirements can be catered for as long as the kitchen is given an advanced warning. Breakfast and lunch can also be enjoyed as a packed meal out in the bush during an early morning or day-long game drive. Alternatively, guests can arrange a hot lunch in the bush, where you will be served a delicious meal surrounded by lush greenery and roaming wildlife.

Enjoy a thrilling game drive along the floor of the world’s largest inactive, intact and unfilled volcanic crater in a specially designed 4×4 safari vehicle. The Ngorongoro Crater was formed when a volcano collapsed in on itself over 2 million years ago. The crater is 2,000 feet deep and it is estimated that the original volcano would have been between 15 thousand and 19 thousand feet high.

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area which surrounds the caldera is home to an abundance of birdlife and wildlife, with a resident population of approximately 25,000 large mammals, including zebras, elephants, spotted hyenas, wildebeest, buffalo, hippos, and the critically endangered black rhinos. Guests will also be able to see the local Ngorongoro Lions who live within this natural enclosure year-round. If your visit is during January and February, you will be treated to front row seats to the wildebeest calving season, where 8,000 new calves are introduced to the world each day. Guests staying for two nights or more will also be able to take a drive to the Lake Manyara National Park and view the incredible birdlife that resides there, including huge populations of pink flamingos.

Visit a Maasai Village and discover a completely different style of living as you learn about the heritage of the Maasai people. Participate in a range of cultural activities and learn about the wilderness from the people who live alongside it.

Sanctuary Ngorongoro Crater Camp is a Sanctuary Retreats safari camp. The Duuma Wajane Bike Shop is supported by Sanctuary Retreats. This employs local women from rural Tanzania who have been widowed and have lost all of their husband’s assets, which are returned to a man’s family in the event of his death. Duuma Wajane offered women to chance to receive extensive training so that they can become bike mechanics and take on a role traditionally reserved for men. This programme is designed to empower women and defy gender constructs that pose as barriers to women being able to provide for their families.

Sanctuary Retreats work closely with Maasai communities in Kenya to help positively impact education, by building classrooms and sponsoring student school fees, developing community enterprise and encouraging conservation. They also run an initiative to introduce sustainable means to acquire clean water for local school students, with a similar initiative in Zambia and Tanzania too. Sanctuary Retreats has partnered with local schools in Tanzania, close to Tarangire National Park to provide “education and support for the next generation of conservationists.”

Another school that is being supported here is Ilboru School for children with special needs. Local businesses have been supported in Zambia with eight local female artisans working in Sishemo Bead Studio in Nakatindi. Through this, these women have a chance to improve not just their own lives but also their families. Sanctuary Retreats works more widely within the village of Nakatindi in Zambia, supporting their primary school by providing school lunches, refurbishing classrooms and building a medical clinic in 2013. Sanctuary Retreats has partnered with the rural village of Sin Kyun in Myanmar. Working alongside the Chief of the village they have built a Middle School, a house for teachers, and provided emergency assistance during severe flooding.

Sanctuary Retreats runs a Safe Water for Schools Initiative, supporting children in local communities by providing LifeStraw filters to schools in various parts of Tanzania, including Arusha, Tarangire and Ngorongoro. They have distributed a total of 106 LifeStraw community filters to 15 schools as of May 2019, and a filter to a health centre within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, where 1,000 patients visit each day to receive health treatments.

These crucial filters purify water and remove bacteria and parasites in order to prevent waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea, typhoid, cholera, worms, and cryptosporidiosis. Thanks to this initiative, 10,265 students and teachers have been provided with access to safe drinking water.

The construction of the Ilboru School was funded by Sanctuary Retreats, providing Arusha’s first primary school designed to cater for children that are deaf and/or disabled. This allowed children with disabilities to receive an education in a setting that could work around the specific needs of the pupils. After finishing primary school, these children had to return to mainstream education where teachers were unable to cater for their learning needs, causing many students to drop out. Sanctuary Retreats has since launched a project to build Ilboru a secondary school where children with disabilities will be able to continue their education and increase their employment prospects on graduating.

‘We have undertaken this project as a partnership with Tanzania’s Ministry of Education. The Ministry provides specially-trained teachers to work at the two-story, five-classroom facility. In addition to standard academic courses, the school teaches vocational skills such as sewing to increase chances the children will find employment upon graduating. In 2016, in partnership with Worldreader, Sanctuary Retreats Philanthropy began an innovative literacy program at Ilboru’s Primary School with the use of digital e-readers which give the deaf and disabled children access to a large library of textbooks and literature in both English and their local language of Swahili.’

Sanctuary Retreats offers children education about the environment and preventing human-wildlife conflict in order to support the next generation of conservationists. By providing this education to children from communities that border national parks, the local people are encouraged to find peaceful solutions to protect their livestock from lions and leopards, and their crops from elephants.

‘In Tanzania, we work in partnership with communities close to Sanctuary Swala Camp in Tarangire National Park to improve the educational environment for children attending Gijedabung and Mwikantsi Primary Schools. We have provided new classrooms and teachers’ housing, textbooks, educational materials and solar power.’

The Serengeti Cheetah Project helps to monitor cheetah populations within the Serengeti National Park, one of the last natural ecosystems with a sustainable cheetah population of 50-80.

‘Sanctuary Kusini, located within the Serengeti National Park, is a proud supporter of this project which has been established for over 30 years. The camp’s location directly in the path of the seasonal cheetah movement makes it ideal to help track this iconic African animal. There are dedicated game drives at Sanctuary Kusini with the specific purpose of finding and identifying cheetahs. Once spotted, guests are encouraged to photograph the cheetah, and leave copies of the sighting photos which are then passed on to the research team. Feedback is then provided when possible to our guests on which cheetah was observed.’

By recorded cheetah sightings and monitoring their numbers, the Serengeti Cheetah Project has been able to collect more research on the big cats, giving them an insight into their behaviour and the best method to continue to protect them and their habitat.