One Way Ticket to Africa: Kruger National Park, South Africa

After our great horse trek through the mountains of Lesotho, we headed off on another great adventure- a safari! We made our way over to Nelspruit, South Africa (via Bloemfontein and Johannesburg) and arranged for a one day one night safari in the park through our hostel. Even the budget safaris like this are quite expensive, but the park itself and the facilities are quite nice and it seems worth the price.

Kruger Park is a very large park. It has multiple 'camps' within the park that are fenced off where there are hotels, camping, restaurants, stores, laundry, and toilet and shower facilities. You are not allowed to walk or bike outside the fenced in areas- don´t want the tourists to get eaten by lions! You have to be in a vehicle at all times. You can go in private vehicles, but you may not get to see as much as you do in the high up safari trucks with open sides. Also, its not always smart to go without a guide as the animals can wander onto the road and if you don´t know how they will react, your car might just get trampled by an elephant.

Anyways, a little about the safari itself- you take about 3 drives through the park each day. The best viewing is in the morning or late afternoon when its not so hot that all the animals hide in the shade. You ride around in an open truck and look for animals, and slow down when you find them and stay and watch them. Our tour group prepared all our meals for us (including a dinner of impala stew...) and the tents are there permanently with matresses and bedding so you don´t have to bring any of your own supplies. Its very easy.

A couple interesting things- there are fences around the camp, but monkeys, baboons, impalas, and warthogs managed to find their way in. I was a little nervous about going around in the dark, but it turned out fine.

Elephants can get a little testy. We were driving the the main gate to pick up some more people and an elephant was in the road and would NOT move. You don´t want to push your luck too much, as they WILL charge. We inched on it and made a lot of noise and such to try to get it to move, but it would just not budge. It chased after us a little bit, but our guide was very experienced and knew how to handle things. We were about 45 minutes late picking the other people up...

The safari story itself is best told in pictures, however the internet connection I am at is very slow and I don´t think I can get them up in a reasonable amount of time. I will post them as soon as I can!

Here are the photos! Enjoy!