Our Year of Wonder: Blyde River Canyon & Kruger

From Gqeberha we flew to Johannesburg and rented another car for our drive to Kruger National Park.

Having heard it is best to top up your fuel tank when you could, a few hours in we decided to stop at a service center (called a Petroport there). To our surprise, as part of the service center, there was a small conservation viewing area. They had a number of animals, but the biggest named one was the almost extinct white rhinos. Their horns were removed and there were warning signs saying there were CCTV cameras monitoring the animals as the biggest threat to them is poaching. This is not where we were expecting to see our first big game animals

Blyde River Canyon

We stopped for the night in Sabie and spent the next day exploring the Blyde River Canyon area. Some claim it is the third largest canyon in the world, but it depends how you measure it. It is definitely one of the greenest ones and at 26km long it is pretty big. We visited the Three Rondavels viewpoint of the canyon, so named due to the rock formations that look like rondavels (the peaked grass huts).

From there we drove to God’s Window & Rainforest Trail which looks out over a huge escarpment.

Kruger – Day 1

We were unsure of what to expect of Kruger Park since we were doing our own driving tour and not taking a guide. This is more cost effective (even though park fees and lodging still made it more expensive then we were hoping) but sometimes it is worth the guides. However, since we were already planning on doing two other guided safaris in Botswana and Tanzania, we decided to go on our own. We were not disappointed and were thrilled with the amount of wildlife we saw. I must say that choosing the Kruger Park pictures to show on the blog made this one of the hardest posts to do. We took so many!

With the drive from Sabie and getting registered at the gate, we actually started driving in the park at around 9:30am. Within about 10 minutes we spotted our first animal, an impala. It was the first of probably over a thousand that we saw.

About five minutes later we turned into the first watering hole and spotted a bloat of hippos at the far end. In this case, a zoom camera and binoculars were a good thing.

And from there we just kept seeing more and more animals and were quite pleased we saw as much as we did since we headed for our check-in at Skukuza Rest Camp at about 2pm.

Unsure of what species this one is, but possibly a waterbuck or a young kudu.

Warthogs and greater kudus.

Cute little steenbok.

Southern ground hornbill, also called Thunderbirds. We found out later these are rare and are endangered. They are valued because they will eat large snakes. The male didn’t like our shiny car rims and pecked at the wheels of our car before moving on.

Wildebeest.

While watching two male impala battle over a herd of female impala (with a few warthogs mixed in) we didn’t notice the two zebras on the other side until they crossed the road.

We caught our first giraffes walking way off in the distance.

Then a little while later, on our way to another watering hole we came across two right by the road and could get a really close look at them.

On our final leg to our lodging, the eagle eyed family noticed a dark blob in the bush a couple of hundreds of meters off the road and thought it was an elephant. We stopped, as did other cars but they quickly moved on. We stayed and were awarded by seeing a male elephant stick its head out. It was down in a small watering hole drinking.

Our patience paid off as it eventually got out of the shallow pool behind the bush and walked away. Definitely needed the full range of our camera and the use of a steady head as a tripod.

Most of the day had been delightful up to that point, but we hit some disappointment when we checked in. One of the reasons for our early arrival is that we wanted to do a bush braai (a BBQ dinner out in the bush) for Marika’s birthday. When doing the booking, the lady that Julia was working with said that we need to arrive early as it is a bit of first come first serve. Since this was the bigger camp, we thought we would have our best chance here even though it was the day before Marika’s birthday. If it didn’t work out, plan B would be the next camp the following night. However, the park’s receptionist that checked us in was pretty grumpy and stated that we need to book that weeks in advance and said that our travel agent should have done it for us or we should have booked it online. We didn’t even know we had a travel agent and we thought we had worked directly with the park. Julia had tried to do the booking online from the main website but turns out the main website directs you to a travel agent to do it. In contacting the travel agent she was upset that this happened as she said that is not how it is supposed to work and that she doesn’t have any way to book the bush braais. We also checked online and couldn’t find anyway to do it. We felt lost between the park receptionist and the travel agent. So it wasn’t possible and plan B didn’t work out either.

The day did end in a positive note though. Our chalet overlooked the river (not a bad place to do school) and in the late afternoon a whole herd of elephants came down to the river to eat and drink (thus ending school). We had seen only the one that afternoon (and it was mostly hidden), and now there were 20 pretty close.

There was also a pretty good steakhouse restaurant at the camp and we were able to get reservations for Marika’s birthday dinner. Marika choose a game platter so we got to try blesbok, impala, and wildebeest. They mostly tasted like steak, but we liked the impala the best.

Day 1 – Estimated Animal Summary

Impalas – hundreds
Hippos – 20
Wildebeest – a few
Waterbuck? – 1
Giraffes – 15
Marabou Storks – 2
Zebras – 2
Wart Hogs – a bunch
Southern Ground Hornbill – 4
Greater Kudu – a few
African Buffalo – a few
Steenbok (or some might be Oribi) – a bunch
Elephants – 21

Kruger – Day 2

Having such a successful first day, we had high expectations for day 2. By the end, we dubbed this day the day of the elephants as we saw so many!

Guinea fowl, warthogs, and monkeys.

What started off as us just barely catching sight of an single elephant in the thick bushes on the side of the road turned into a 20+ elephant crossing! Thankfully we were the first car to see it and had front row seats as the crossing created a traffic jam behind us and also from the other direction.

Saddle-billed stork

Another large herd of elephants.

A stop at a sheltered picnic area for lunch.

Our first predator; a spotted hyena.

Southern yellow-billed hornbill and a lilac-breasted roller.

And more elephants.

And then we finally found them – lions! They weren’t that far off the road but easy to miss in the grass when they are laying down.

No male in this pride of lions (or he was somewhere else) but still fantastic to see.

A birthday picture over the safari plains.

And even more elephants. It felt like we were seeing them everywhere now, even behind herds of impala (which is the animal you see the most of).

Saw our first crocodile as we got close to Lower Sabie Rest Camp.

Since we were full from our previous night dinner we didn’t get dessert, but today was the actual birthday so we saved room for dessert this time!

This restaurant at the rest camp had a deck that overlooked the Lower Sabie River (and the fence surrounding the camp) and during our meal some rustling in the bush had people shining flashlights down and we saw two hyenas coming out of a den. Hard to get a good picture but we saw two more.

Day 2 – Estimated Animal Summary

Impalas – hundreds (though not as many as yesterday)
Monkeys – a bunch
Giraffes – 20
Warthog – a few
African Buffalo – 2
Elephants – about 100!!!
Guinea Fowl – a bunch
Zebras – 25
Baboons – a bunch
Striped skink – 1
Mongoose – 1
Saddle-billed Stork – 1
Spotted Hyena – 3
Lions – 5
Southern yellow-billed hornbill – a bunch
Lilac-breasted roller – 5
Crocodile – 1

Kruger – Day 3

There is a human tendency that when things have gone so well in previous days, that there is an expectation for even more. Of the big five of Africa (elephant, lion, rhino, buffalo, leopard – named because they were traditionally the hardest to hunt) we had seen three of them. So there was an expressed desire to see a leopard and a rhino. We also hoped to see a male lion, a cheetah, and some wild dogs. We were unable to see any of those and instead saw a lot of what we had already seen. If this had been the first day we would have been ecstatic about it and we had to keep reminding ourselves that it was still a great day. In the end, even though we only saw a few new animals, we got some even closer and better views of ones we had already seen.