Up at 5am: painful to say the least after a 13 ½ hour flight the day before, but something we were going to get used to over the next few days! We left Johannesburg and drove the 8 ½ hours to the Kruger National Park through some of the most beautiful scenery we’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot after New Zealand! At lunch time we arrived at a cheetah rehabilitation centre, which is just outside the national park. The centre is a private reserve where they keep cheetahs, wild dogs and lions that were either sick in the wild or mistreated by humans. For example, they have two lions at the centre that used to be part of a Portuguese circus. The circus pulled out the claws of the male lion and castrated him, preventing his main from growing, as he no longer had enough testosterone. After the cheetah centre we drove to our accommodation for the three nights, a beautiful lodge in a private reserve, where we frequently saw zebras metres from our lodge.
The following day we were up at 4:30am (making us dream of 5am lie ins!), and headed off to Kruger itself. Once at the park we transferred to an open game vehicle, driven by a Kruger guide who told us all about the park and the animals. Once we were inside the park properly it was only a couple of minutes before we saw our first animals – two massive rhinos. A couple of minutes further down the track we saw two elephants. These were followed by a ‘journey’ of giraffes, a ‘dazzle’ of zebras and a ‘raft’ of hippos. We also saw numerous buffalos and lions throughout the day, as well as warthogs, wilderbeest and ostriches. In the afternoon we also managed to see a leopard sat in the trees in the shade, which was amazing, especially as our guide said he hadn’t seen a leopard in 6 weeks.
That evening we headed back to the lodge and had a relaxing evening around the camp fire sipping South African beers (bottled lion’s piss in Ryan’s opinion!) and in the case of the Germans who were with us, whiskey!
The following morning our guide managed to wangle us a lie in with our Kruger guide, so we didn’t have to get up until 5am again: bliss! We then headed back into Kruger again for the day, again seeing lots of all of the big 5 (lion, elephant, rhino, buffalo and leopard – the 5 most dangerous animals of the bush) apart from another leopard. We also saw numerous zebras and giraffes, reaching the point where we didn’t even bother stopping to take pictures! The most amazing sight of the day however, was when a large elephant emerged from the bush and started crossing the track, being followed by around 7 elephants all decreasing in size, finishing with a tiny 6 month old elephant, who was so cute! The group was then rounded off by another massive elephant, making sure there were no stragglers!
That afternoon we headed back to our lodge where we transferred into another game vehicle to go on a sunset/night safari. This time however, we didn’t head into Kruger, but to a private game reserve, where Elton John apparently stays on his annual visit to South Africa (how true this is we’re not sure!). On arriving at the reserve our guide said they’d had a number of sightings of a leopard in a particular area of the reserve that we were going to investigate. After some pretty adventurous off-roading we found ourselves in the base of a small valley in and amongst the trees and bushes. We then realised we were sitting around 5 metres away from a female leopard, who was lying in the long grass. We were all amazed at how close she was. After a few minutes she started yawning, which our guide said meant she was likely to be getting ready to get up. Around 5 minutes later she did just that, walking about a metre away from our vehicle, and showing us her teeth as she passed! After the sunset we also saw a lion incredibly close up, and three rhinos, including an infant – a pretty amazing evening.
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