Truck Day 18 – Kruger National Park

Alarm shrills into life at 4.45am, breakfast at 5.15am and at 6am we clamber sleepily onto the safari truck for whole day game drive returning at around 4pm. Despite the earlyness of the hour we’re excited for the potential Game sightings ahead. We enter Kruger via the Numbi gate which is literally 5 minutes from where we are staying.

Kruger is one of the world’s best national parks in terms of wildlife alone. It’s diversity and sheer number of animals is almost unrivalled. The landscape is vast stretching over 19,485km, about the size of Wales. This is the park that inspired the Lion King its vast and teeming with wildlife – 146 species of mammals and over 500 varieties of birds.

Our drive is in the Southern Region of the park where the rainfall is almost 50% more than in the North. For this reason, this Region has the highest proportion of Game calling the area home, so we’re very optimistic that we’ll get some good sightings. The thickness of the bush however makes it more difficult to instantly spot wildlife and alongside our own wildlife spotting we’re often reliant on the guides liaising with each other over the radio or by happening upon a parked car or game drive truck and following the direction of their gaze.

Kruger is indeed teeming with wildlife and we’re richly rewarded with sightings of elephants, impalas, waterbucks
giraffes & their babies, zebras, mother & 2 hyena cubs, vultures, wildebeest, lions, warthogs, painted (wild) dogs, mongoose, white rhino, African hornbill, steenbock, leopard tortoise, hippos oh and the animal that neither of us had seen in the wild before and had always hoped to see, a beautiful Leopard.

She’s a beautiful female who we stumble across literally driving around a corner to where a car was parked by the side of the road and the occupants advise that there’s a leopard moving in the Bush. We can see her but not brilliantly but not to worry as she continues to walk and emerges from the Bush where she nochantly hops up onto a large boulder and sprawls out ready for her “close ups”. It’s an incredible experience and one we know we must cherish as the guide picks up his radio to advise of the sighting it’s only minutes before at least 6 other vehicles descend on our spot. It’s been a brilliant day, 8 hours in a open-sided truck in sun, wind and rain has been worth every second. We go to bed grinning from ear to ear.