Being in South Africa for a few weeks now we had heard the hype of Kruger. Everyone we met said it was fantastic but we may or may not see the big five (buffalo, lions, leopard, elephant, and rhino – are called the big five because during the good old poaching days these were said to be the 5 most dangerous animals to hunt). We had also heard that Kruger books up quickly so we were glad that we had pre-booked our 14 days of camping in June while we were in Mendoza, Argentina. We read up on some of the camps and thought because we had the time we would start in the South and work our way North through most of the park. Kruger is about 20,000 km2 in size, which is comparable to the size of Wales.
74 km east of Nelspruit we drove through the Malelane Gate where our adventure in Kruger began! On the way to our camp we spotted rhino, elephants, zebra, crocodiles and countless impala. Once arriving at our first “camp” (Berg en Dal) we were totally impressed because the “camp” is more like a resort; including a curio shop (small grocery/souvenir shop), a restaurant, ice cream shop, several self-catering lodges ranging in size to fit between 2-12 people, a swimming pool with waterfall, a beautiful walkway over-looking a dam, which continued into the Rhino trail (mini hike around the camp), and a large campsite each with individual braais, a shared water faucet, garbage cans, and then bathrooms with hot showers, a kitchen with gas stove tops and on-demand boiled water. Most of the campers, more like glampers (glamorous campers), set up along the fence line so we found a nice spot at the back next to the fence. We stayed at this camp for three nights and really enjoyed ourselves. All of Kruger’s camps are similar to the description above. We split our time into five different camps, three were normal and two were rustic (running water but no electricity).
As you can imagine this blog would be enormous if we wrote all of what we saw so we are only including the highlights split into two semi chronological blogs.
Watching a herd of zebra walk in sink bobbing their heads, which we later found out was because bont flies lay larvae in their noses and they bob to get them out…pretty entertaining. Watching herds of animals walk right out of the bush and onto the road, giving us great picture opportunities. We laughed every time we would see impala drinking then get spooked and dart off in every direction, the impala looked like they were always on edge, probably because they are a great snack for any big cat! We saw a wildebeest fight, buffalos drinking and bathing in a swimming hole, a crocodile eating an antelope (its legs were still sticking out from the croc's mouth) while the antelopes new born was on the shore trying to nurse from another animal with no luck. It was sad to watch as you knew shortly after the new born would become a light snack for another predator.