Safariin Kruger
Ranger Solomon, who always knows where the lion is right now, elephants crossing the road, a leopard in a traffic jam of cars and an albino elephant. The only ones we missed were rhinos.
The seventh chapter of the South Africa trip. From Cape Town we flew to Kruger National Park to see animals. How the park works, how to get there and where to stay I’ve covered separately, because figuring it all out wasn’t easy. Here come the days themselves.
A safari with a ranger
In mid-January there was a serious flood in Kruger and part of the park was closed. Luckily, our camp and the places we drove through weren’t affected.
We landed, took a transfer to Pretoriuskop camp and checked in. And then it turned out that the park’s own game drives for that day were already fully booked.
So we arranged something with our driver, the ranger Solomon from Mthunzi Safari & Transfers. Solomon was born in these parts and knows everything about the animals. He accepted our proposal on the spot, with no booking or anything, and I’m grateful to him for that. We rested for literally an hour, met up and set off straight away.
One of the advantages of going with a ranger rather than driving yourself is that rangers talk to each other. Solomon was on the radio almost the whole time, finding out where which animals had been seen, and we’d drive right there.
One downside: he isn’t employed by the park, so we could only drive with him until 6 p.m.. But overall we liked it very much. The next day we decided not to book separate game drives and drove with Solomon again, all day.
What we saw
On the first day: elephants, a lot of them: they crossed the road right in front of the car. Vervet monkeys, the little white ones with black faces. Lots of impala. Hyenas with cubs. Wildebeest.
On the second day we first met a lioness, then a giraffe. We got a glimpse of a leopard. There was a whole crowd around it, cars queuing up. Then a lion.
And then, out of the blue, we saw three elephants mating together (if you know what I mean), and one of them was an albino. That’s a real rarity you probably won’t see anywhere else. A very lucky find.
Over those days we also saw a bird that looked like a hawk, a family of hippos, wild dogs, zebras and warthogs.
The night game drive
On the evening of the second day we went on a night game drive from our camp. It’s not that we saw many animals, but there were lots of owls. Our ranger even spotted a really tiny chameleon. Elephants are active at night, and we saw buffalo too.
The tip we couldn’t leave
An important thing we didn’t know. Rangers count on tips, and on game drives from the camp they’re left in cash. That’s very unusual for South Africa: here you get used to paying by card everywhere, even for tips.
We had no cash. We were ready to withdraw it or send it any way possible, PayPal, crypto, anything, but there was no way to. The ranger was very upset. That’s how we parted: him upset, and us too. Take cash with you on game drives. More about tipping in South Africa is in the prologue.
The Big Five, minus one
The “Big Five” are the lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino. They were once called the most dangerous animals for hunters, and now it’s the list everyone on safari chases. We chased it too, and saw all of them except the rhinos.
The last morning
For all those days I wasn’t feeling great at times: I’d come down with something after surfing (definitely not my sport). There was an idea to go on one more drive at 4 a.m. before the flight, but it would have been too hard. I decided to simply rest. Then a transfer to the airport and a flight to the Garden Route.
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