kruger park visit 2008
During November, I took my yearly leave and set off for a week long chill session at the Kruger Park with one of my friends. The Kruger has got to be my favourite holiday destination; It is cheap, close to Pretoria and a damn cool place in general.
We left Pretoria on a Monday morning early, by which time it was already pretty hot and humid. A sign of things to come no doubt. Arriving at the Malelane gate at about 9 AM, we already knew. It was going to be a hot day. A very hot day. On the way to Berg-en-Dal, we spotted 4 of the big 5, missing only the Leopard. Not a bad tally for a 10 km stretch of road. But then again, the Berg-en-Dal area is always a brilliant place to see loads of animals. If you ever go to the Kruger I would highly recommend this camp. It has won Best Camp for numerous years running for a good reason.
But back to the heat. The Monday was a scorcher. It touched on 43C in the shade with 80% humidity - or that is what the fancy weather thingy said, but it could not have been far off. Not fun at all. The only respite from the heat was driving around in my car, because it has air-con. Normally I take heat well - not that kind of heat though. We reached a silent agreement that, was it as hot the next day, we would head out to Badplaas, a resort close by, on Tuesday afternoon. Luckily by late Monday afternoon cloud cover came to our rescue and a quick shower during the night cooled everything down. The rest of the week, we had perfect weather! Partly cloudy with light rain late at night.
Sightings wise, we were extremely lucky, seeing things that most people never get to see. Not everything was luck though, we were quite patient and planned our trips well. If you ever want to get some nice sightings, doing 50 kmph on tarred roads won’t work, ok? Just some of the cool stuff we saw;
- Hyena vs Lion battle for a kill - that was awesome!
- Hyena with a still born cub - interesting to see their reaction to the dead cub
- Wild Dogs tearing an Impala apart - gruesome but pretty lucky though, most people never even see Wild Dogs
- Two Lion Buffalo kills - not the kill itself, but one kill was very fresh
- A Hyena running down the road - we followed it for about 2 km while it was doing close on 35 kph, the stamina and speed impressed me being a marathon runner (no we did not chase it with the car…)
- Three Leopards - I always see loads of them, but around Berg-en-Dal there are dozens - so it is not hard. Still awesome though
- LOADS of Lions
- Young Elephant bulls fighting - it was scary and fascinating at the same time. Scary when they took to chasing the car when we were trapped in a waterhole loop
- Black Backed Jackal hunting Francolin - my first time ever spotting wild Jackals (really) and to see them hunting (a group of 4) was pretty cool for me
- And all the usual things like close Elephant encounters (other than above), Giant Snails, Giraffe, Eagles etc etc
All in all it was a awesome week! We almost stayed an extra night - looking back I regret that we did not. Below are some photos we took, we don’t have fancy cameras nor are we “amateur” photographers - we just took some photos;
We also took some videos, they are low resolution as we were running out of memory on the camera and did not want to delete other photos (it was a bad call…). To see the videos please visit my YouTube page or my Zoopy page.
The only thing that I really regret about our week there, apart from having to come home, was killing a snake. All week long I really wanted to see a snake, because I rarely see snakes in the Park. Only skins etc. I was getting obsessive about spotting a snake, at times even wanting to follow Snake Eagles! Low and behold, on the very last day on the way out, we see a snake! And it sails right in front of the car, followed by me running over it and killing it. What a douche bag!
For some additional info;
http://www.sanparks.org/parks/kruger/camps/berg-en-dal/
