Tag Archives: national park

Back where we began

February 28, 2015South Africaafrica, camping, national park, safari, south africa, travel, wildlifeJudy

We’re at the O.R. Tambo Airport in Joburg, with an hour or so before we board the plane to Singapore. It’s a bit hard to believe we’ve been here for 6 weeks, and that our amazing African adventure is over. We’ve thrown stuff out, left other stuff in a pile at the campground hoping that some of it may find its way to someone else who can make use of it and packed up the stuff we’re taking home. We brought a set of portable digital scales with us to avoid the mad panic of chucking (even more!) stuff out at the airport as we did in the US last year. Our bags weigh about the same as they did when we arrived – we’ve added more books and a beautiful, but heavy, cast iron bread tin with a lid, and discarded some cooking stuff, linen and a few clothes.

We stayed at the Avant Garde Lodge in Kempton Park, near the airport in Joburg last night. We booked it on booking.com, but they also have their own website here. Lovely rooms, breakfast included and they also offer dinner. We were more than happy to eat there after driving 600kms, and there was a thunderstorm just after we arrived so it was good to not have to go out again to find dinner. It’s a great place to stay as it’s close to the airport, but it would also be lovely to spend a few days there lounging by the pool and enjoying the beautiful gardens.

The trip has been fantastic – much better than I dared to hope it would be. We didn’t get sick, mugged, robbed or scammed, weren’t involved in any road accidents, which was my biggest fear after we realised that South Africa really isn’t a dark, dangerous hotbed of crime – the drivers here really are terrible. Greg has handled all the driving with incredible grace and good humour – the awful road conditions, shocking drivers, occasional hard-to-find places – all of it has just become another part of the grand adventure rather than an insurmountable obstacle, thanks to Mr Adventure. He’s a great travelling companion.

Before we came, I hadn’t really thought too much about the wildlife we might see … or rather, I didn’t want to have high expectations in case we didn’t get to see much. Ha! It’s a bit like some of the other adventures we’ve had – all you have to do is turn up. We’ve seen so much wildilfe, but sadly never did see a leopard or a cheetah. We’ll put them on our wish list for next time. And there will definitely be a ‘next time’.Even though we have visited every South African province (some of them very briefly), there are still parts of it that we want to visit or revisit. Wouldn’t bother with the eastern coast again, but Cape Town, Western Cape and more of the North-Western Province, definitely. I’d go back to Kruger and Addo National Parks in a heartbeat, and would love to spend more time in Botswana. Namibia and Zambia will be on the list too.

To everyone who has been following along at home, thanks for reading, commenting, emailing and keeping in touch. We’re planning a 4WD trip at home in a few months, to do the Canning Stock Route in Western Australia. We won’t be blogging as regularly due to lack of internet access and power, but we’ll keep a blog and update it when we can. Hope you can join us for that one too!

What happens when you mix wet concrete and Hippos

Pesky monkeys waiting in the trees to try to steal food from us

Cape Vidal, Isimangaliso Wetland Park

February 26, 2015South Africaafrica, camping, food, national park, nature reserve, safari, south africa, travel, wildlife, zebrasJudy

For our last couple of days and nights, we’re at a wildlife park on the north coast. Its one of the oldest and largest conservation areas in South Africa and goes as far north as the Mozambique border. The reserve is very long and narrow and includes several large freshwater lakes, plus Lake St Lucia which is actually a vast estuary for several rivers. It includes a marine sanctuary, a wide range of game animals, has breeding grounds for 2 marine turtle species, is one of South Africa’s top dive locations, and it seems that everyone apart from us is keen on fishing. As we drove to the campground we saw a zebra, a few antelopey thingys (couldn’t tell what type as they were too far away), and then there were a couple of new little antelopey thingys grazing near our tent site when we got here. Not sure what they were – some kind of grysbok or duiker, perhaps.

We’re staying at Cape Vidal campground, which is about 35kms north of the park entrance near St Lucia. This reserve isn’t part of the SA National Parks group, so our Wild Card doesn’t cover it and we paid an entrance fee in addition to the exhorbitant campground site fees. The entrance fee was okay, but at $55 per night for a powered site, this is the most we have ever paid to pitch a tent. It makes what we paid in Norway in 2013, and at Cradle Mountain, Tassie at Easter last year look reasonable!

The campground is fine, but nothing special – we paid less than 1/3 the night we pitched the tent on the deck in the forest and THAT was special. This one has sandy sites, unimaginative allocation system where we just got the next empty site in the row, when there are other more secluded sites that we’d prefer. Then the next people to come along got the site next to us, and so on.

The monkeys are here in abundance, but none have really bothered us yet. We sat and cooked in the tent last night, which was a good thing in more ways than one as we realised this morning that we’re back in a malarial zone. But just now I got up and walked 5 paces to put something in the car, and in that time a monkey came and sat on the laptop to check out if we had any food on the table worth stealing. They are swarming all over our next door neighbour’s tent and stuff, but he hasn’t left anything interesting out either.

So now we’re at the ‘what was I thinking’ stage of the trip. Happens every time – we end up with a strange collection of food that don’t go well together, and I don’t remember why I bought them in the first place. It’s not too bad though, we don’t have a lot left, apart from most of a kilo of ‘cake flour’. Every supermarket here sells 2 kinds of plain flour – cake flour and bread flour. Each has different protein levels, depending on what you want to use it for. I guess cake flour is the same as our plain flour.

Tomorrow is our last day, we fly out around midday on Saturday. We’ll pack up what we’re taking home, throw out and give away what we’re not, and drive the 600kms to Joburg. This afternoon we’ll drive around part of the reserve and hopefully see some wildlife

It is fine to swim just watch out for the Hippos,sharks,crocs and rips... — It is fine to swim just watch out for the Hippos, sharks, crocs and rips…

Camped at Cape Vidal the most expensive campsite we have stayed at in Africa

Cape Vidal beach looking towards Mozambique — Cape Vidal beach looking north towards Mozambique about 200km away

Gonubie, East London

February 21, 2015South AfricaAddo Elephant National Park, adelaide, africa, camping, eastern cape, national park, nature reserve, safari, south africa, travel, wildlife, zebrasJudy

After a couple of days at Addo Elephant National Park, we’re on the move again, heading east towards Durban, where we’re planning on spending a couple of nights.

We went for a drive in the park yesterday afternoon and saw lots of wildlife, including a meercat. We hadn’t seen any meercats before. And just as we’d decided we’d seen enough and were heading back to camp, we found the most beautiful young mother elephant and her calf, eating grass close to the road. We spent ages just watching the 2 of them eat, pulling up a few blades of grass at a time with their trunks. Their trunks are incredible instruments – capable of such fine actions, but also of smelling and detecting things. Their eyesight is very poor.

Close to the park’s office complex is a viewing deck overlooking a waterhole where elephants go to drink. It’s floodlit at night, which doesn’t seem to bother the elephants at all. We walked to it after dinner last night and there was one big fella having a drink.

We drove through Adelaide in Eastern Cape today. As far as we know, apart from our hometown, it’s the only other Adelaide in the world, so we just had to go there. Lots of ‘Welcome to Adelaide’ signs, it has a hospital, a large town square and a museum in an old stately home from the 1860s that looks like it should be on a tobcco plantation in Louisiana, USA. Unfortunately the museum was closed. Not sure what the population is, a couple of thousand perhaps. Like its South Australian namesake, there seemed to be a lot of churches!

We’re staying at a campground just east of East London and we’re the only campers here, although Greg went to try and have a look at the beach (no luck, there’s an electric fence in the way) and one cabin is also occupied. Bit of a shame as the campground has a lovely pool and other facilities, but the road here from the freeway is appalling – major road works on the access road, then a rutted unsealed track that most caravan owners probably wouldn’t like to drive on. Just up the road a bit is a nice sealed section, with brick walls and footpaths on both sides of the road. Strange thing is that behind the brick walls is just an overgrown mess. Like a developer got as far as a decent road and a bit of infrastructure, then ran out of money.

The fence keeping in all the Elephants built in the 1930s

Elephant under floodlights at night outside the main camp

Adelaide public library (Eastern Cape South Africa)

Addo Elephant National Park

February 20, 2015South Africaafrica, braai, camping, national park, nature reserve, south africa, travel, zebrasJudy

Now I see why this route along the south east coast is called The Garden Route. As we drove along yesterday morning, there were loads of proteas, plumbago and other flowers blooming at the edge of the road. It was raining and we were on the main freeway, so we couldn’t stop to take photos.
The night before last, we ‘pitched’ the tent on a timber platform suspended over forest at Diepwalle National Park in Knysna Forest. To get there, we had to drive through a township, then 15kms on an unsealed road. All but the last couple of kms were pretty good, mainly because the grader had JUST been through. We met it along the track, and then the last couple of kms that hadn’t been done were dreadful. If the whole track had been like that, we probably would have given up.

Greg had read about the Forest Timber Camping Decks in the Knysna Forest on the National Parks website, but there wasn’t a lot of info about them, and no review on Trip Advisor, so it was all a bit mysterious until we actually got there. There are 10 decks, including one with disabled access and 4 with permanent tents set up. Apart from us, only one other deck was occupied. Great for us as we don’t have a strong herding instinct, but a shame that such beautifully constructed decks with excellent facilities aren’t being utilised.

The decks were constructed in 2007, and each deck has space for a reasonable sized tent (ours is a 4-person with large vestibules front and back), plus room for chairs, table and gear. There is a high bench with shelving underneath and a couple of rustic bar stools, a braai, power and lights. As we couldn’t use tent pegs to anchor the tent, Greg got very inventive with tying guy ropes to the slats of the floor and to the railing around the deck. We lit the braai and cooked braaiwors, a long sausage curled into a circle, potatoes and zucchini. My timing was a bit off with the potatoes- I should have par-boiled them first – but we left them in the coals after we’d had dinner, then fried them for breakfast.

It still really surprises us how well-equipped most campsites in South Africa are. Just about every site is powered, with a water tap either at the site or close by. Bathrooms all have hot & cold water, showers and often a bathtub, plus facilities for washing dishes and clothes. Larger parks also have a camp kitchen, with sinks, hotplates and a boiling water dispenser. Compared with campgrounds we’ve stayed at at home, these are excellent. And cheap. The Camping Deck cost us less than $20 for the night.

We kept on driving east, stopping in at Port Elizabeth for some supplies and lunch. PE, or ‘The Bay’, is one of the largest cities in South Africa, with a population of just under 250,000, over 50% of them white. It’s a very large shipping port. East London, which is about 250kms further east, is the largest city in Eastern Cape. From those names, you can guess that the British were the ones who settled this area … in the early 1800s.
About 40kms east of PE is a little seaside village that we just HAD to visit … Colchester. Not much like its British namesake, just a service station and some houses tucked in behind a wall of high sand dunes. Greg’s dad is from the original Colchester in Essex, and Greg and his family lived there for a few years in the early 1960s. There is also a town called Adelaide in Eastern Cape, a couple of hundred kms north of where we are now. We’ll head there after we leave the Addo Elephant National Park tomorrow to see what’s there.

So we’re back in wildlife-spotting mode. Drove into Addo yesterday afternoon, through the southern gate near Colchester. We booked 2 nights at the Main Camp, which is at the northern edge of the park, a 50km drive. We took a few side-roads and saw lots of wildlife, so I’ll resurrect the Wildlife Tally again

Wildlife tally for Thursday 19 Feb

antelopey thingies – common duiker, kudu, red hartebeest. Different species to the ones we saw all the time in Kruger, which were mostly springbok and impala
zebras
elephant
ostrich
warthogs, so many warthogs!
leopard tortoise

New to the list – flightless dung beetles & black -headed herons

This park is so different to Kruger …. of course! Much milder climate, quite mountainous and it’s mostly coastal scrub with just a few tall trees. There is a waterhole near the main camp’s office/restaurant/shop complex with a viewing platform, and a large ‘grandmother group’ of elephants visited this morning.

the coast north of Glentana beach (indian Ocean)

Turnoff to Colchester, a little town behind a sand dune on the Indian Ocean

The biggest thing in Colchester the Service Station and Mini supermarket (Kwik Spar)

Ostrich at the side of the road in Addo Elephant Park

Spikey bush. We have this mantra that every bush and tree in Africa is spikey. Its not completely true but mostly true. This is a bush at the end of our campsite, and we have had other deadly looking bushes at other campsites

Glentana Beach

February 18, 2015South Africaafrica, camping, national park, travel, western cape, wildlifeJudy

We’re heading east to Durban, and then eventually back to Jo’burg. We drove through Western Cape yesterday, and now we’re almost in Eastern Cape, spent last night camping at the Glentana Beach campground, which is set just back from the beach. There are 2-storey beach houses along the beachfront, then the campground is set just behind the houses in a secluded area, and then there are more houses behind the campground on higher ground so they have a view. So having the campground in the ‘hollow’ seems like good use of the space.

Eastern Cape is in the ‘Garden Route’ part of South Africa. Not sure if it’s just clever advertising, but the climate here is apparently one of the most temperate in the world. Mild winters, comfortable summers and plenty of rain, if the grassy campsites are anything to go by. There is a team of guys here lawmmowing and whipper-snipping the thick grass, and where they have already been looks like a bowling green.

We drove past the turn-off to Cape Agulhas, the southern-most tip of South Africa yesterday morning. It is also the official dividing point of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. We didn’t go there – maybe next time!

Not a lot of wildlife-spotting recently, although I did see a dwarf mongoose at Table Mountain, and we saw some rock hyraxes at the Cape of Good Hope. These mammals look like giant brown guinea pigs, ranging from 2 to 4 times the size. What’s really interesting and quite amazing about them is that their closest living relatives are the elephant and sirenians ( which includes the dugong and manatees)!

We’ve booked a couple of nights at the Addo Elephant National Park, which is a couple of hundred kms further east. We couldn’t get in tonight, so we’ll try the Garden Route National Park which has incorporated several national parks and forests, with a few accommodation options.

Looking back to Cape Town, false bay and the suburbs and towns east of Cape Town

Don't feed the Baboons signs are everywhere — Don’t feed the Baboons signs are everywhere

Glentana Beach (click on photo for a larger view)

Exploring Cape Town

February 15, 2015South Africaafrica, cape town, national park, south africa, travelJudy

We’ve spent the last couple of days exploring the Cape Peninsula. Yesterday (Saturday, Valentines Day), we drove up to Signal Hill, which is another high point that overlooks the city and out over the Atlantic Ocean. Lots of people doing the walk up to the cable car to take them up to Table Mountain. We planned on walking up Table Mountain today, but it was too cloudy and very windy, and the cable car was closed.

After we’d been to Signal Point, we went looking for lunch at the Victoria and Albert Waterfront. Lots of shops, fast food chains, restaurants and people! We had lunch at a little Italian cafe, and dessert at another Italian cafe, then walked to Nobel Square, which has statues of the 4 South African Nobel Prize winners – Albert Luthuli, Bishop Desmond Tutu, FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela.

We drove to the northern beaches of Cape Town, to Milnerton, parked the car and walked on the sandy beach to stand in the Atlantic Ocean. We have a tradition of dipping our feet in the ocean, whenever we are somewhere interesting. It was FREEZING, so cold that we didn’t stop long enough to take a photo. During our 2011 road trip across the US, we stood in the Atlantic Ocean in Florida, and the Pacific Ocean in California. There were hardly any swimmers, but lots of kite-surfers and wind-surfers out on the water, all wearing full wetsuits (in summer!), and the back-drop of Table Mountain behind the city was stunning – it’s one of the most beautiful cities I’ve seen.

We had plans to visit Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and many other political prisoners were incarcerated, but have read a few not-so-complimentary reviews of it, and decided not to go. Neither of us is particularly good on a boat or ferry, and the tours of the prison seem to be a bit random, with very large groups, over-booked ferries and general dissatisfaction about the whole process, so we decided against it.

Today, our plans for visiting Table Mountain were nixed by the weather, so we drove down to the Cape of Good Hope instead. We drove down the eastern side of the Cape Peninsula, then drove back on the western side. Lots of little seaside towns along the way – we stopped at a couple to look at the beaches and to have something to eat. The Cape of Good Hope is in the Table Mountains National Park. Long queue to get through the park gates, then a drive of about 10kms to get to the Cape, the south-westernmost point of Africa. Next stop: Antarctica.

The western side of the peninsula is absolutely spectacular. There’s a section of the road called Chapman’s Peak Drive which goes for about 10kms along the coast between Noordhoek and Hout Bay, winding around the cliffs and looking over the beaches, towns and out to sea. Before we did the drive, we hadn’t realised how scenic it would be. Only cars can go along this road, because part of it is carved into rock and it’s only high enough for cars, no buses or minibuses allowed. Well worth the toll of around $4.00

Back to CT via the coast, which was a bit like Malibu in California – amazing apartments, shops, people, cars – with Table Mtn still covered in cloud, and the wind still howling. We had pan-fried free range ostrich steaks for dinner and they tasted good. Like very lean, light beef.

Looking back to Cape town from the Northern beaches

Paddling in the Indian Ocean at Kalk Bay

Judy climbing up to the hill on the Cape of Good Hope

Looking towards Antarctica from the Cape of Good Hope

Looking towards Cape Point and Australia

Driving down the cape Penisular towards Cape of Good Hope on the eastern side and back up on the western side via the fantastic Chapmans Peak Drive

Everything Greg knows about lions, he learnt from The Lion King

February 5, 2015South Africaafrica, braai, camping, giraffes, kruger national park, national park, rhinoceros, safari, satara rest camp, south africa, travel, wildlife, zebrasJudy

Wildlife tally for Wednesday Feb 4

elephants
giraffes
antelopey thingies – impala
buffalo
hippo
warthogs
zebras
white rhinos
blue wildebeest
tortoise
storks
vultures
New to our list today – a rock monitor who lives around our campsite. A very good reason to take a torch and wear thongs or sandals when venturing away from the tent in the dark.

We took a short drive out to Mlondozi, a popular picnic spot a bit north of Lower Sabie. Up on a hill, it overlooks a river and the Lebombo Mountains, which mark the border with Mozambique. So that’s probably as close as we’ll get to Moz. The picnic area was busy, and I guess in the busy periods it would be impossible to get into … or out of. Not much wildlife around at that time of the day, and it was hot – 37C
We headed back to camp for a swim, then went for a drive later in the afternoon, south towards Crcodile Bridge. We saw 4 more rhinos, including a group of 3. Plus a big group … oops, tower … of giraffes. 8, the most we have seen together. And on the flora side of things, we found sausage trees! Lovely large leafy trees that have red flowers in spring, which become sausage-shaped seed pods that drop in autumn. They are heavy so it’s best not to stand under one of these trees at that time of the year. The only animal that likes to eat the ‘sausages’ is the baboon. The seed pods are very fibrous.

Last night’s dinner was blue wildebeest schnitzel steaks, cooked on a braai! The wildebeest smelt a bit ‘gamey’ when it was cooking, but they tasted very much like beef. 500g cost less than $6, and as Greg pointed out, they were probably as low in food miles and carbon footprint as we could get.
We had a HUGE thunderstorm last night. Clear sky when we went to bed, 2 hours later the lightning and thunder woke us up and we took shelter in the car for a while. This morning … clear sky again, and very high humidity.

We’re leaving Kruger today. Its been an amazing week here, but now it’s time to move on and find more adventures. We’re going to Swaziland for a couple of days and may not have internet access there. In which case, see you on Saturday when we get to Joburg

Everything Greg knows about lions, he learnt from The Lion King movie
A group of lions is called a ‘pride’, but only if they are standing on Pride Rock. We haven’t found Pride Rock yet, so that might be why we haven’t seen many lions.
He keeps looking for meerkats, but hasn’t found any yet. But they must be here somewhere ‘cos we’ve seen heaps of warthogs, and Timon and Pumbaa were best buddies.
Warthogs are much, much uglier in real life than Pumbaa was in the movie. They must have Photoshopped him.
Zazu the bossy bird in the movie (Rowan Atkinson was his voice) was a red-billed hornbill, like the one that fell in love with our car when we camped at Satara Rest Camp. We didn’t realise it at the time or we would have made sure we got a photo. We have seen a few since, but never close enough to get a decent photo.

Hippo pokes its head out of the Sabie River

Rhino versus Car. This Rhino got a bit agitated by the car. Then later a truck came along and nearly hit the Rhino, it then ran off.

Cooking blue wildebeest schnitzel steaks on the Braai

Bread choices in South Africa are between Brown Bread and White bread. Almost zero specialty bread like multigrain etc

Lower Sabie Rest Camp, Kruger National Park

February 4, 2015South Africaafrica, African wild dogs, camping, kruger national park, national park, rhinoceros, safari, south africa, travel, wildlifeJudy

Wildlife tally for Tuesday Feb 3

elephants
giraffes
antelopey thingies – impala and waterbuck, plus a couple of new additions to the list below
blue wildebeest
buffalo
mongoose
baboons

New to our list today
guinea fowl
duiker – a little antelope with very delicate features and tiny horns
springbok – we realise that we’ve probably seen lots of these before and thought they were impala. Springbok have straight antlers that curve at the end. Impala have antlers that twist. In case you were wondering.
vultures – we think a group of vultures should be called a ‘death-watch’. According to wikipedia, it’s a wake, committee, venue, kettle, or volt. ‘Wake’ is pretty good, but I still like our ‘death-watch’ the best.
African wild dogs. We saw a pair of them at a waterhole and got pretty excited. They are rare here, according to wikipedia, in 2009 there were only about 150 in the whole of Kruger.
Number 1 spot must go to the pair of rhinos we saw on our way to Lower Sabie campground yesterday afternoon. I hadn’t really thought we’d be lucky enough to see any here, but this mother and son pair just wandered onto the road we were driving along. They stood there for a couple of minutes while we got all excited and took photos and a video, then they wandered off into the scrub. If we had been just a couple of minutes later, we would never have known they had been there. Rhinos are HUGE! Much larger than I thought they would be.

We’re now in the southern part of Kruger, staying at Lower Sabie campground. Lots more people in this part of the park – campers, tourists, tour buses, sightseers. We drove from the park’s main campground & administration centre Skukuza yesterday afternoon and that was when we saw most of the animals on the list above. We’ve decided that late afternoon drives are the most worthwhile as that’s when the wildlife is out and about. On that same stretch of road, we saw some elephant dung on the road, with lots of whole, unripe marula in it, and a bit further down the road we found the elephant! Wandering all over the road, picking at bits of shrub then dropping then, a bit unsure of where he was going next. We just sat and waited until it was safe to pass him. In the comments section of the Satara Rest Camp post, our friend Hazel warned us about marula-eating elephants, and we’ve seen a youtube video of an elephant destroying a car in Kruger, and didn’t want a repeat of that.

Dinner last night was springbok burgers that we bought from the well-stocked shop at Skukuza. 4 burger patties cost us less than $5. We could also have had warthog fillet, various antelopey-thingie sausages and a variety of other game meat choices, in addition to beef, chicken, lamb and pork. Tonight we’re thinking of cooking some kind of boerwors (long sausage that’s curled into a circle) on a braai, as long as we can get some firewood. We’ll share photos, of course.

The rental car company, Avis, has given us permission to take the car into Swaziland, so we’re heading there tomorrow for a couple of days. We have used Avis for our last few trips and they have alway been very helpful, and even replaced the car when we (and they) couldn’t get a tyre to replace the one that got wrecked while we were driving in Oslo.

I know almost nothing about Swaziland, apart from what I read in Richard E Grant’s book The Wah Wah Diaries, about making his autobiographical movie, Wah Wah. There are a couple of national parks and we’ll camp somewhere. The capital, Mbabane, has a population of 60,000, Swaziland is a landlocked country, sharing borders with Mozambique and South Africa. They have their own currency, but the South African rand is accepted there, which we’re happy about as we won’t have to exchange any money. I went into a bank yesterday clutching a wad of Botswana pula, hoping to exchange them into rand. The teller almost shooed me out, so we’re going to try at Joburg airport. I now know that the rand is accepted in Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and of course South Africa. Various travel sites also claim that it’s accepted in Zimbabwe, which may be true outside of Victoria Falls, but at Vic Falls it’s USD all the way. Which seems odd when the US has trade sanctions against Zim.

Fresh elephant dung on the road, with unripe marula in it

Mozambique

February 3, 2015South Africaafrica, camping, giraffes, kruger national park, national park, safari, south africa, travel, wildlife, zebrasJudy

Wildlife tally for Monday Feb 2

zebras
elephants
giraffes
antelopey thingies – impala and waterbuck. We see so many of them that now we just call them all ‘antelopey thingies’. If we find something different that we haven’t seen before, I’ll add it to the list
blue wildebeest
baboons

New to our list today – lions! 2 lionesses actually. They were about 100 metres away from us, sitting in grass near a bush and we could really only see them when they raised their heads. If someone hadn’t stopped to tell us they were there, we wouldn’t have known. Still, it was exciting for us to finally see them. Greg marked the spot on the GPS and we stopped again on the way back – they had moved into the sun as it was late afternoon and ther previous spot in the shade would have been getting cool. Then last night there was one roaring and growling somewhere nearby … on the other side of the campground fence, I hope!

Despite the title of this blog post, we’re not going to Mozambique. We thought about it as Kruger National Park continues across the border into Mozambique to become the Limpopo Transfrontier Park, and visiting the capital, Mabuto, would be interesting. But we can’t take the car, a day visa costs $80 each and we heard a horror story about corrupt Moz immigration officials from a South African woman when we did the tour to Vic Falls. I’ll re-tell it here in the hope that it warns other people to be vigilant at borders.

This woman had been to Moz at least half a dozen times before and travels around Southern Africa a lot, so she isn’t a novice, but the last time she and her adult daughter went to Moz, their passports weren’t stamped and they didn’t realise it. She remembers hearing the thump of the stamp, but it didn’t go on the passport. They only realised when they were trying to leave the country and got hit with a 2,500 rand fine each (around $300). They didn’t have that kind of cash with them, so the officials held the daughter while the woman went try and get the money from an ATM across the border. While she was there, her car was robbed and she lost phones and other valuables. The daughter eventually got away and the woman got in touch with Moz officials much higher up the chain and got it sorted out. But tourists wouldn’t have the time or connections to be able to do that.

So …. anyone travelling to Mozambique needs to be vigilant about making sure their passports are stamped properly.

We’re heading south today, but still staying in Kruger. We’re planning on camping at the Crocodile Bridge campground as it’s good for seeing lions and rhinos. Fingers crossed! On the way, we’re calling in to Szkuza, which is the main camping and admin area in Kruger. There is an Avis office there and we want to get written permission to take the car into Swaziland. If we get permission, we’ll spend a couple of days there before we head back to Joburg on Saturday.

Another zazzle of Zebras — Another dazzle of Zebras

The electric fence that keeps the Lions out

Satara Rest Camp, Kruger National Park

February 2, 2015South Africaafrica, braai, camping, kruger national park, national park, safari, satara rest camp, south africa, travel, wildlife, zebrasJudy

Wildlife tally for Sunday Feb 1
We’ve learnt some new words for describing groups of animals, and couldn’t wait to show off our improved vocabulary. There’s a good list here

Here’s what we saw yesterday.

dazzles of zebras
a couple of herds or parades of elephants
a bloat of hippopotamus
a tower of giraffes
impala
bushbuck
waterbuck
common reedbuck
a leopard tortoise
New to our list today – lots of banded mongoose including many babies and an implausibility of blue wildebeest.

My favourite group description is a ‘dazzle of zebras’, Greg’s is ‘an implausibility of wildebeest’. I’m really hoping to see a crash of rhinos while we’re here. Greg has added more photos to our last post, Out & about in Northern Kruger National Park, including a better pic of the crocs with the dead hippo, so you can play ‘Spot the Crocs’.

We have been befriended by a Southern red-billed hornbill. He has fallen in love with our car, or rather, his reflection of himself in the car’s windscreen. He’s quite tame, very persistent, quite vocal and I reckon if Greg spent enough time with him, he’d be able to teach him how to count to 10 by the time we leave.

Our friend Margaret commented that she hadn’t realised that Kruger National Park was so popular. Here’s a bit more info about it:

Around 19,500 square kms, covering 350km north-south and 60km east-west. The entire eastern boundary forms the border with Mozambique, and with Zimbabwe along the Limpopo River to the north. Along the western edge are several large privately owned game reserves, most (if not all) of which offer upmarket accommodation and wildlife experiences. We’re not upmarket enough with our tent, so we’ll stick to staying in some of the 26 (!!!) campgrounds in Kruger, which are able to provide accommodation for over 4000 people per night. We moved to the Satara Rest Camp this afternoon, which is in the Central part of Kruger. There are 3 guesthouses here, 180 self-contained units and a 600-site campground. And there are a couple of even larger campgrounds further south!

It hasn’t been busy anywhere we’ve stayed or driven, but during the summer and other school holidays, I’m sure it would be packed. It’s only a few hundred kms from Joburg and Pretoria and South Africans do love the outdoors. I think they are even keener barbecuers than Australians, if that’s possible. They call a barbecue a ‘braai’ – rhymes with ‘dry’ – and have all sorts of braai utensils and equipment that we’ve never seen before. We bought a beautiful cast-iron bread tin with lid (like this one here) that I’m looking forward to using when we go outback camping at home. A braai is standard in all campsites – it might be a half 44-gallon drum on its side, some kind of large dish to hold coals with a grill above it or even just a concrete area to light a fire on. There is always something so that people can cook outside … and they do!

Another Safari camp at Satara Rest Camp, note Braai stand to left

Out & about in Northern Kruger National Park

February 1, 2015South Africaafrica, camping, kruger national park, national park, safari, south africa, travel, wildlifeJudy

We’ve spent the last couple of nights at the Letaba Campground complex, and done a couple of drives around this northern part of Kruger – one during the day yesterday to Olifants Camp , and an early morning drive to Englehard Dam this morning. We’re not usually ‘morning people’, but the combination of birdsong and cars driving past to do their own early morning drives had us up and out the entrance gate of Letaba by 5.50am.

Yesterday’s drive during the heat of the day took us along the Letaba River. We saw a group of zebras just across the track we were driving on, a couple of groups of buffalo (we’re a bit scared of them as apparently they charge without warning and are the most aggressive of the ‘Big 5′ animals), and lots of antelopes. There are many different antelope species, I’ve managed to identify 3 or 4 so far, thanks to our guide book which lists 20 or so. Nyala, impala, bushbuck and this morning we saw some waterbuck.

But the most interesting thing we saw yesterday was at Oliphant River, which has among the highest densities of crocodile in Africa. It took us a few minutes to work out what we were seeing in the water … a dead hippo with about a dozen crocs around it. We counted 8 or 9 at the time, then looked at enlarged images of the photos Greg took when we got back to camp and realised there were more than that, including one lying on a nearby rock that we hadn’t even noticed at the time, we were so busy looking at the crocs around the hippo. Poor hippo had been there for a while, if the smell was anything to go by. No carrion birds – maybe they get their turn after the crocs have finished.

Just after we set out this morning, we saw some fresh piles of elephant dung on the road, but only saw one elephant a few kms further along. He just walked about 5 metres in front of the car, straight across the track towards the river. He was a man with a mission, took absolutely no notice of us, although if we had been any closer, it could have been awkward. The track led to a great view of Englehard Dam, and on the way back we saw hippos lolling in the water, waterbuck and birds.

Zebras that we stuck up on — Zebras that we crept up on (a Dazzle of Zebras)

The Zebra and impala occupied the road again after we passed

A Baobab related to Australias boab trees

A cape buffalo, known to be aggressive and dangerous

10+ Nile Crocs feeding on a Hippo carcass (click for a larger version and see how many you can count)

View of Oliphants River from Oliphants camp (click for a larger view)

The Lataba River at sunset (click for a larger view)

Elephant finishes scratching himself on tree

Then Elephant walks across road in front of us (and thankfully ignoring us)

Kruger National Park – finally!

January 31, 2015South Africacamping, kruger national park, national park, nature reserve, south africa, travel, wildlifeJudy

We’ve made it! If it hadn’t taken us so much longer than we intended, arriving at Kruger wouldn’t really be a big deal. As the country’s most popular and best-known tourist destination, people visit this park in droves – as day visitors, on bus tours, to stay overnight or longer, to see wildlife and to generally just chill out.

Still, our travels to get here have been interesting and thankfully we’ve had no major mishaps along the way. We somehow just seem to choose the ‘road less travelled’, don’t we?

We have been driving through orange groves, banana and mango plantations and past farms growing tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins and maize. Always maize, planted wherever there are a few spare metres of vacant land. On our way here, we drove past the area where the liqueur Amarula is made. It’s a creamy liqueur made from marula fruit, known as ‘elephant fruit’ because apparently elephants will walk for miles to eat them, they are so delicious. We saw people picking the fruit from trees by the side of the road. I guess if there is one commercial manufacturer of Amarula, there are lots of backyard operations and ‘home-brewers’ of it as well.

Kruger is a huge national park and has loads of campgrounds and other accommodation spread around it. We’re staying at a very large one, the Letaba Camp, in the northern part of the park that has a petrol station, shop, restaurant and even a couple of laundromats! There are a lot of different accommodation options here, ranging from 2 guesthouses, family units with a couple of bedrooms, kitchen & bathroom to more basic huts that share kitchens and communal bathrooms, some fixed tents and a large camping area that only has about 6 caravans and 2 tents – ours and one that belongs to some black people. We chatted with a guy at a caravan and camping store and he told us that the blacks are getting more into camping now … as the black middle class grows, I guess.

We went and had a drink on the verandah of the restaurant last night. It overlooks the Letaba River and is apparently good for wildlife viewing. We saw a hippo and an elephant which was a bit unexciting after the teeming wildlife we saw on our Chobe River boat trip. Not sure if we were too late, or if there just isn’t as much here as in northern Botswana. We’ll keep looking, though.

We’re planning on spending a week here, staying at various places, and will then go back to Joburg next weekend for a few nights, hopefully in a loft apartment in a trendy part of town. We have to take the car back and get another one, and there’s a Sunday market that sounds great, and the Apartheid Museum seems to be a must-visit.

Ugh, it’s humid here. It rained last night and we had to race around and get stuff under cover. After a week in Botswana where it hardly ever rains in summer, we’re not used to it … although we should be after 3 weeks of daily thunderstorms in the US while we were camping last year!

As I’m writing this, there’s a cheeky squirrel who keeps trying to sneak up and see what he can take from us. A few nights ago we left the boot open while we were having dinner and the next morning I found that our bread had been nibbled and tiny droppings around it. I was a bit scared that we might have shut the creature up in the boot overnight, but nothing jumped out at me, thank goodness!

The squirrel that keeps on trying to get into the tent

SA to SA

Judy and Gregs travels through Southern Africa