After spending a few days in Blyde River Canyon, we made the
short drive to Kruger National Park. This
is one of the oldest and largest game reserves in Africa, extending 220 miles
from north to south and averaging about 40 miles wide. We entered the park on the southwest side at
the Phabeni Gate. Neither of us had been
on safari before so we weren’t sure what to expect. We checked in at the gate and got some
information and a map.
Within the park, there are 21 rest camps, as well as several
high-end private safari lodges, which were way out of our price range. The rest
camps are surrounded by an electric fence with a guarded gate where you can come
and go. This keeps most of the animals
out, but some of the smaller ones and especially the baboons are still able to
make it inside. The gates generally open
around 5:30 am and close at 6:30 pm. You
have to be in before they close, or they charge you a large fee to open them
back up.
Within the rest camps, there are various types of lodging,
from campsites to small huts. Located throughout
the camps are communal bathrooms with showers and communal cooking stations. The two camps that we stayed in where the
largest in the park and had the most amenities, including a restaurant, grocery
store and a gas station.
Our first camp was Skukuza, where we stayed in a safari
tent. The tents were on cement slabs,
with two single beds and a small refrigerator inside. Ours was along the perimeter of the camp,
with our braai (Afrikaans word for barbecue) right by the fence. Each night, a pack of hyenas prowled along
the outside of the fence, smelling the meat on the grill. There are signs everywhere to not feed the
animals, but I’m sure some people have ignored those warnings. It was unnerving to have such a dangerous
animal so close, staring back at you a few feet away through the fence. And the noises these animals made were
bizarre. We now know where the
expression “laugh like a hyena” comes from.
 |
| Skukuza rest camp |
For those who aren’t staying at one of the high-end private
safari lodges, there are a couple of ways to see the park. You can drive around in your car, or you can
sign up for one of the organized tours in a big safari jeep led by park rangers. The tours are inexpensive, and you have the
advantage of an experienced guide, a much higher viewing platform (compared to
our tiny rental car), and a group of people to help spot the animals. We decided to try a tour once and signed up
for the early morning one that left at 4 am.
It was interesting to go with a guide, but we didn’t do any better in
terms of spotting animals and found that we preferred to just drive around on
our own.
Doing a self-drive tour involves cruising down the many
paved and dirt roads that wind through the park at about 10 – 15 mph. When you spot an animal and you want to stop
for a while and watch it, you can pull over to either side. Since traffic is moving so slowly, it isn’t a
problem to be in the wrong lane and if there is a good spotting, it isn’t
uncommon to have 10 cars lumped together pointed all different directions and
blocking the road. There are speed
limits in the park at 45 kph (28 mph) for paved roads and 35 kph (22 mph) for
dirt roads, and they are strictly enforced.
This is a good thing as drivers are often looking off into the bush and not
always in their own lane. It is also
good because animals could jump in front of your car, or maybe they are just
sitting or napping in the middle of the road.
 |
| animal crossing |
While out of the gated camps, you aren’t allowed to get out
of your car for obvious safety reasons.
In fact, if you have a flat tire, you are supposed to just wait for
another car to come by and have them send word to the park rangers at a nearby
camp, who will come help and keep watch.
There was one area that you were allowed to leave your car on the south side
of the park on the Crocodile River. We
came down to look for a pride of lions that were reportedly spotted in the area
and saw that there was a viewing area.
There was a ranger perched up the hill on a rock that whistled at us and
waved us up. We nervously got out of the
car and walked up to the viewpoint. The
ranger had a gun, which looked more like an antique than something capable of
taking down a lion. There were nice
views from up on the rock, and the ranger pointed out the crocodiles and hippos
in the water below and some paintings in the rocks that were left years ago by
the San Bushman.
For most of our stay in the park, we rose early in the
morning and stopped by the camp headquarters.
Here they had two big maps of the park where people would mark the
animals seen during the day with colored magnets. One map was for the current day and the other
for the previous day. We mainly looked
to see where the big cats were spotted and then planned our route around that. We left the camps as soon as the gates opened,
returning for a few hours during the hottest part of the day, and heading back
out for the afternoon. This was because
you more likely to spot the animals during the cooler morning and early evening,
and it was really hot driving around in the middle of the day.
One of the carry overs from the old safari days, which were
primarily trophy-hunting expeditions, is the notion of the “big five” animals. These are the elephant, buffalo, rhino, lion
and leopard. It is a goal of most of
people who go on a safari to check these off the list. We saw
our first one within minutes of driving into the park when a herd of elephants
were eating along the side of the road.
They were huge and left a trail of demolished trees and bushes in their
wake. There are nearly 12,000 elephants
in the park, and they were very easy to spot.
This is the world’s largest land animal and probably the most
intimidating when you are sitting next to them in a car that is smaller than
they are. It’s not common, but they can
be aggressive, and we had an encounter with one that was walking down the side
of the road. We tried to pass it, but it
wouldn’t let us. As we got closer, it turned
around and blocked the whole road, raising its trunk and stomping its feet. We did a u-turn and headed back the other
direction.
About an hour after spotting the elephants, we came across a
large herd of buffalo crossing the road.
We were only a couple hours in the park, and we had already seen two of
the big five. This was another animal that we saw quite a bit throughout the
park, usually when a very large herd was crossing the road, one or two at a
time. We often had to wait for over 30
minutes for the whole herd to get through.
This was also an animal that you don’t want to rush, as they can be temperamental
and have been known to charge cars. It
was really interesting to see them around the watering hole during the heat of
the day when they roll around and emerge covered in a thick coat of mud to keep
cool.
There are two kinds of rhinoceros in the park – the white
and black. They are both actually a
similar color, but the white rhino has a wide mouth that is better suited for
grazing and the black rhino has more of a V-shaped mouth that is better for plucking
twigs. We saw about a dozen white rhinos,
but no black rhinos. Both types are still
being poached today, as their horns are believed to be an aphrodisiac and fetch
a large amount of money in Asia. There
are only a few hundred of the black rhinos left in the world, and they are
considered critically endangered. The park service is doing what they can to
stop poaching, using helicopters and apparently drones to help spot the
poachers. While we were there, it seemed
that poachers had been spotted, as a helicopter flew over us, very close to the
ground. Shortly after, a truck filled
with dogs and machine gun wielding police passed us at about five times the speed
limit.
The big cats are probably the most exciting of the animals
to see and the most difficult to spot.
They are mostly nocturnal, and it didn’t help that we visited during the
summer when the bush is at its most dense.
They eluded us for several days, and our first spotting was three lions napping
on the far end of a waterhole. Then a couple days before we left, we were lucky
to see four cars stopped in the road just as we left the camp at 6 am. We pulled up and parked but couldn’t see
anything. People in another car told us
there were four lions in the bush, and a few minutes later two of them emerged
right in front of us. They wandered
through the parked cars like a couple of exhibitionists, stretching and yawning
and then laid down in the middle of the road for a nap. We watched them for about thirty minutes
before they headed back into the bush and out of view.
Halfway through our stay, we had a stretch of good luck and
saw four different leopards. The first had
just dragged its kill (an impala) up into a tree about 100 ft from the road and
was having lunch. These cats can drag
prey up to three times their weight up into the canopy, keeping it out of reach
of other predators. There were at least
twenty cars backed up trying to get a look.
An hour later, we were driving down the road, and Andrew
spotted another leopard lounging in a tree, this one much closer to the
road. Being the first to see it, we had
a prime spot to take some pictures as he slowly stood, stretched, and climbed
down from the tree.
The following morning, we drove the same road, and yet
another leopard came walking out of the bush right in front of our car. It slowly walked by, fixing his eyes on
Andrew as he frantically snapped pictures.
As it passed within a few feet of the car, he had to put the camera down
and roll up the window. Later that day,
we could hardly believe our luck when we happened upon another leopard sitting
on the side of the road. While leopards are
generally solitary animals that don’t make much noise, this one seemed to be injured
and made a strange moaning/howling sound.
The most prevalent animal in the park is the antelope. These are similar to deer, except that
instead of seasonal antlers, they have permanent horns. There are quite a few different antelope in
the park and we saw waterbuck, the beautiful greater kudu, blue wildebeest, the
small klipspringer and many impala. In
fact, there are around 1.5 million impala alone in Kruger. After a few days, we rarely stopped when we
saw antelope.
 |
| blue wildebeest, greater kudu, impala, klipspringer, waterbuck |
Besides the big five and antelope, there are a wide variety
of other animals in the park. In fact
there are 147 specials of mammals in the park alone. Di’s favorite animal was the giraffe, and we
saw them just about every day. We also
enjoyed seeing the zebras, which were also prevalent and provided some entertainment
with their spastic gait. We usually spent about an hour parked in front
of one of the waterholes every day and watched the hippos, crocodiles and other
animals drinking and taking a dip to cool off.
There were also plenty of monkeys, baboons, warthogs and giant lizards
to name a few. The only thing that we
really wanted to see and didn’t was the cheetah.
 |
| common hippopotamus |
 |
| Burchell's zebra |
 |
| southern giraffe |
 |
| chacma baboon |
 |
| leopard tortoise, Nile crocodile, Nile monitor, vervet monkey, warthog, lizard |
Before we came to the park, we didn’t even think about the birds that we would see, but Kruger is a birdwatcher’s paradise. We saw a yellow-billed hornbill eating a big hairy spider, vultures picking at the leftover remains of an antelope, and eagles perched on top of trees looking for prey. We saw ostriches as well as many other brightly colored small birds. There are reportedly 517 species of birds in Kruger National Park alone.
 |
| brown-hooded kingfisher, crested barbet, pied kingfisher, ostrich, yellow-billed hornbill, helmeted guineafowl, tawny eagle |
 |
| oxpeckers on an impala |
One of the more interesting birds that we saw quite
regularly was the oxpecker. These birds
sit on animals and eat parasites off of them.
We saw them on rhinos, giraffes, antelopes and zebras.
Our last night in Kruger brought a spectacular thunderstorm
with lots of lightning and heavy rain, ending our drive a bit early. The next morning, we reluctantly left the
park and headed south. Our safari trip
was the highlight of our visit to South Africa.
It is a completely different experience seeing these animals in the
wild. We probably won’t have much
interest in going to zoos after this.
After spending so many hours in the car during the previous
week, we were looking forward to our next stop in the Drakensberg
Mountains. This is South Africa’s
highest mountain range, and there are several national parks within it. Our first stop was the Royal Natal National
Park. The main attraction here is the
Amphitheatre, which is a crescent-shaped wall four miles wide and nearly 5,000
feet high. The top of the wall is over
10,000 ft above sea level.
We stayed at the Thendele Rest Camp, which is situated on
the side of a mountain opposite the Amphitheatre. The views from the patio of our chalet were
stunning, facing out over the park. As
we enjoyed our morning coffee, guineafowl pecked around looking for scraps,
while baboons ran from chalet to chalet doing the same. The wild life in South Africa seems to be
plentiful everywhere.
While there, we attempted to hike from our lodge to the top
of the Amphitheatre. The first section was a bit challenging, but the views all
along the way were spectacular. On one
section called “the crack”, we climbed up a rocky cliff through a series of
rope ladders, passing directly under a waterfall, bringing us up to the top a
ridge. From here, it was gentler slopes,
with grassy fields and lots of wildflowers.
It took five hours to reach the ranger station near the ridge
of the Amphitheatre. From here the trail
continues along the ridge sometimes leaving South Africa and entering the
neighboring Kingdom of Lesotho. The gate
attendant told us it was another two hours to reach the top of Tugela Falls. This is where the Tugela River plunges 3,080
feet, making it the second highest waterfall in the world. Our legs and feet were already aching and we
didn’t think it was possible to add another two hours one way to the trip and
still make it back to our lodge before sunset, so we decided to turn
around. It was disappointing not to
reach the waterfall, but when we reached the car that afternoon barely able to
walk, we were glad to have turned around when we did. It was still a nice hike in some of the most
beautiful scenery we’ve seen.
 |
| hiking in Royal Natal National Park |
The next day we packed up and moved a little further south
in the mountain range to an area called Giant’s Castle. This
area got its name from the outline of the peaks that resemble the side profile
of a sleeping giant. We did a short hike
that afternoon to some nearby caves to see the cave paintings. These were done by the San Bushman, an indigenous
people in South Africa that lived in the caves, maybe even as late as the early
20th century. They were
skilled hunter-gatherers and nomadic, leaving few traces of their existence
other than the rock paintings. There was
a guide at the caves who gave us a good tour and some insight to the meanings
of the paintings and how they were made.
She also gave an impressive display of the San language, skillfully making
the clicking and popping sounds that are unique to the language.
The next morning was sunny and clear, so we squeezed in one
more hike to a lookout called World’s View.
We could see the entire Drakensberg escarpment, from Cathedral Peak to
Giant’s Castle. This area is so
beautiful and has such great hiking that we were wishing for just a few more
days in the park. But, it was time to
get back to Durban and start moving down the coast. We had a nice trip inland and were able to
see quite a bit of South Africa. By the
time we returned to the marina, we had put over 2,000 miles on our rental
car.
 |
| hiking near Giant's Castle |