One Day in Kruger National Park: One of My Favorite Monday Mornings

Not all Mondays are created equally, and visiting Kruger National Park may be my favorite Monday morning in the books. If you’re interested in visiting Kruger during your trip to South Africa (and why wouldn’t you be), here’s a little more about my trip.

First off Kruger National Park is one of the largest game reserves in Africa, meaning you have your choice of four airports to fly into (Skukuza Airport, Phalaborwa Airport, Hoedspruit Airport and the Kruger/Mpumalanga International Airport). We flew into Kruger/Mpumalanga and booked a hotel in Nelspruit which is by the Southern entrance to the park.

For Kruger, you can do the safari for as many days as you want, but we just hired a car for a day. Our driver, Deon picked us up at 6am in the morning in an open air safari vehicle. Driving to the park as the sun was rising and our hair was blowing through the air set the mood for the day. Once we entered the park, we had a quick breakfast and then headed out on the safari.

Our sole focus for about 8 hours was spotting animals. In particular the Big Five. The Big Five animals are the lion, the leopard, the rhino, the elephant, and the buffalo. They are known as the five most difficult animals in Africa to hunt on foot., and they are the most dangerous species for big game hunters to hunt. We ended up seeing all of them but the leopard (pictures below).

I cannot explain how cool seeing a safari for the first time is. I’ve seen elephants before at sanctuary in Southeast Asia, and in cages at the zoo, but seeing them in their natural habitat is something different entirely. The safari is not a theme park, it is real life. Humans don’t feed these animals, which means you can watch a lion attack an impala right in front of your car (if you’re lucky). We didn’t see that, but we did see lions prowling on impalas, and rhinos kicking lions out of their territory. I feel like a complete dork but it’s really amazing watching these animals interact with each other in the wild.

I’d highly recommend getting a guide for Kruger. Deon was super helpful and knew where to find all of the animals. All of the tour guides also radio each other when they spot something cool. It’s harder than you think to spot animals when the safari is so big. I can’t count how many times one of us said “elephant!” or “rhino!” for it to just turn out to be a rock. We also almost missed a rhino crossing the road in front of us because we were looking at the lions. Obviously we need more practice if we ever want to work on an African Safari. It was also really funny watching Deon pick up rhino poop and with his bare hands to prove it was only plants, which prompted our car to say “it still comes from it’s butt though, right?” I’d hire him just for that alone.

The ride back from Kruger to our hotel was an eye opener. We passed through a few neighborhoods on the outskirts of the park where children were walking home from school.

Once we were back, we watched sunset from our hotel and ate dinner at Orange restaurant. They had some interesting dishes such as ostrich carpaccio. It was my first time eating ostrich, and hopefully not my last:

A note on safety outside of Kruger National Park: some of the neighborhoods outside the park can have high rates of crime. Be careful and avoid walking around outside of the hotel gates at night. Use common sense.