Kruger Safari

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Late on our last night in Pretria we got the call from our tour guide to say we would be getting picked up at 5.15am!!! We hadn't realised when we booked that Kruger is a good 6 hours drive from Pretoria, add in a couple of hours for picking other people up from Joburg and we had been on the bus for 8 hours before arriving at our camp site. Bearing in mind this had been sold to us a permanantly erected tents with beds inside we were a bit miffed to be shown to a crummy 2 berth tent with wet mattresses inside due to the heavy rain from the previous days. This coupled with about 50% of our clothes being soaking from being in the trailor (seems things which are supposed to be waterproof over here just aren't!!) on the journey left us wondering what we had got ourselves in for!!

But things improved from there. Luckily we had no more rain for the whole trip, there was a good crownd on the trip and we solved the accomodation problem by sneaking into the nearby permanant tent when everyone else had gone to bed and waking up early to sneak back to our wet tent (no one suspected a thing!!)

The next 2 days we were up and on our way into the Kruger enclosure by 5am and spending pretty much all day driving around on the look out for animals. You can spend a lot of time seeing nothing but its worth it for when you do spot something. Everyone over here talks about the BIG 5 (lion, rhino, buffolo, leopard and elephant). By the end of the first day we had only seen elephants from this grouping along with plenty of Zebra, Giraffes, Impala, Kudu (both types of antelope), Hippos and a green mamba snake! Was a good day but did start to wonder if we would be unlucky and not see any of the other big 5.

Then we went for an evening drive in the dark though a private reserve and within 10 mins we had seen 2 rhino and about 20 buffolo. Buffolos spent most of their time sparring with each other by clashing horns which reminded you just how close you were to wild animals!

Then on the second day drive we finally spotted 2 lions and saw some African wild dogs (which are highly endangered) tucking into a recently killed Impla. Our guide said this was so rare to see, people who have been doing safari for years have not seen this. The closest we saw to a leopard was seeing an Impala hanging from a tree having been killed by a Leopard so they couldn't have been far away but these are the toughest to spot.

So all in all a great experience. We have spent the last couple of days enjoying a bit of luxury in lodges rather than hostels so we are nice and refreshed for our 12 hour flight to Sydney this evening. SA has flown by but has been excellent and looking forward to the next stop!!

PS. Have tried repling to messages posted on here but not sure they are reaching you as keep getting error messages (seems all computers here have no decent software installed)

PPS. Have added a few more pics to last blog

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Photos

Impala
Those shapes under the tree in the background are lions but they are too lazy to hunt during the heat of the day

Sleeping pack of humans
Early mornings and long days!

Rhino
Good job my camera has a good zoom, this was from quite a distance

Camp
Where we should have slept on the left, where we did sleep on the right!

Zebra
In case you couldn't tell!

Troop of baboons
You should be thankful we didn't include a shot from the rear!

Evening game drive
Not many pictures came out well

Wild dogs stink
They urinate on each other to establish hierarchy

Cheetah
Came very close

Giraffe
Had some very close to out camp

Kudu
Tried some of this in a pie last night, very nice!