Kruger

After a quick night stop in Nelspruit, where we experienced yet another South African shopping mall, we entered the southern end of Kruger National park via the Malelane Gate. This area has the highest concentration of game, but as a result it also has the highest concentration of cars. Whilst we found the cars immediately it took us took us a good few hours to find the game. In the end, all our searching in the bush for glimpses of movement of change in colours were in vain. Instead, our first significant sighting of the day walked right across the road in front of us, and was pretty hard to miss, given it was a group of five elephants.














Unfortunately, we had set ourselves a rather ambitions target for our next night's accommodating, so had to put in quite a lot of driving to make our way sufficiently far north. Still the driving is made much more interesting when you don't know what you will find around the next corner. We mostly found giraffes and elephants. Unfortunately, because it was a holiday weekend, we didn't manage to secure ourselves accommodation in the park for the first night, so instead stayed in a comfortable lodge around 20km out from Orpen Gate.














The concentration of animals is meant to decrease as you move further north in the park, but we actually had much better luck the next day finding a group of 4 lionesses (they were easy to spot given the 5 or so cars parked beside them), followed by a frisky bully elephant and many giraffe. The scenery around the central area of the park is also very beautiful, in particular the stunning view of the Olifants River that you get from the Olifants Rest Camp.

As we were staying the night in the park, at Mopani Rest Camp, we took the opportunity to do a night game drive. This started well with a beautiful male lion sat right in the middle of the road. We also met some hippos who were out for their evening grass eating. After this, things went downhill and we had to make do with bush hares.



















We spent our third day in the park exploring the northern region of the park. This area is much quieter, and for one stretch of a couple of hours not seeing any other cars, which makes the experience of finding animals much more exciting. We spent much of the day following the course of some of the many rivers, which gave us some excellent hippo sightings. We also found a herd of around 20-30 elephants together with a lone hippo, who had made their way down to the river to drink. We had a spectacular view of them down the river bank which was made even more special by the fact that there were no other cars around.














We were reminded of just how intimidating these creatures are when, a little earlier, we rounded a corner to find ourselves confronted by a startled elephant. I'm not sure if had decided if it wanted to charge us or nor, but to be on the safe side I accelerated out of the way pretty quickly, skilfully (well luckily) avoiding hitting any trees. It took quite a while for my heart rate to get back to normal.














Our day ended with another treat, a group of around six giraffes, including one who was having a good go at rutting.

We spent our final night in the park in a 'tent' at Punda Maria Rest Camp. Now this is my kind of camping. Our tent came equipped with double bed, bathroom and a fully equipped kitchen. We set off early the next morning to fit in a quick game drive before the long drive back to Jo'burg. Unfortunately we got stuck in traffic Kruger style, that is behind a very large bull elephant, so ended up leaving the park much later than intended.