The Kruger National Park

This morning I was up first at 5:15am closely followed by Pete then Ellie, we were all super excited, today was the day we were going to the Kruger.
At 6:20am we all bundled in the car, armed with cameras and packed with food and drinks for a picnic later and we set off for the gates.
Pete did his usual thing of telling us at the gates that we needed our passports which we didn’t have but luckily we had photo ID in the form of our driving licenses and got access. Then we were on our way.
We first crossed over the amazing crocodile river seeing hippos and crocodile in the water and on the other side we were officially in the park and our game drive had begun.
We were on the lookout for anything different today and new species were a must and our first sighting was a dwarf mongoose, a whole family of them running along the dirt roads. Then we rounded a corner and Ellie spotted an eagle owl sitting on the branch of a dead tree. This was a super rare daytime sighting.
By mid morning we had passed hundreds of impala’s, Kudus, water buffalo and wilderbeast when we passed a group of game drive vehicles parked up on a side road.
We pulled up behind them and from the front of one of the them walked a mother and baby rhino. It was another incredible sighting and we were super close. From there we drove to a viewpoint high up on a rock and had a panoramic view of the Kruger National park.
Just after 1:30pm and around 100km into the park we came to a rest stop that had a cafe, picnic area and small shop. We stopped here for lunch and Pete cooked us all Impala and cheese sausage in hotdog rolls with Braie sauce.
From there we had to start heading back as the road we wanted was closed and we just didn’t have the time to go further up and take a detour.
For the next 2 hours it was pretty quiet animal wise as we were in the heat of the day at 32°c and the animals had obviously sought shelter while we drove around cooking in the mobile greenhouse that is Karin.
Pete said the animals would start to be more visible again between 3:30 and 4pm and bang on 3:30pm a huge elephant came trundling down the road towards us. Pete turned the engine off and done the windows up and just as he got to the car he turned off the road and walked into the bush.
Then at exactly 4pm as we started going downhill we spotted something running down the road. As we got closer we saw it was a hyena and we couldn’t believe our luck. Straight away I was hanging out of the back windows with my camera while Ellie was videoing with her phone from the front. To top the sighting off he just ran in front of the car for about 400 meters then he stopped and we were right next to him. He just stood there looking at us while we clicked away. It was another super rare and incredible sighting.
We drove on and just 50 meters down the road we found another hyena just laying down at the side of the road. We stopped again to take pictures and then realised we were parked next to a huge hole under the road. It was there den, and they were coming out to start the hunt early as it had been so hot all day.
It was now 4:45pm and we had to be out by 6pm and it would take us another 45 mins to reach the gate with no sightings.
Luckily there were no more rare sightings and we left the park just after 5:30pm, exhausted from all the hunting but thrilled with what we had seen.Read more