Safari in Kruger National Park

Kruger National Park offers one of the best wildlife experiences in Africa. It was established in 1898 to protect the wildlife of the South African Lowvel. This national park is nearly 2 million hectares and a home to an impressive number of species: 336 trees, 49 fish, 34 amphibians, 114 reptiles, 507 birds and 147 mammals.

We had the most amazing time on our 3 day safari in Kruger National Park!

We stayed in a lodge in the Klaserie Private Game reserve. There are private game reserves surrounding the entire park which is where you generally find the lodge accommodation. Most of the lodges are extremely expensive and even the more budget ones run $2-400/night.

We booked quite late (lodges tend to book up a year in advance) and we only had a handful of places that were available in our price range to choose from.  In the end the lodge we chose the cheapest of the bunch but it had amazing reviews so we took our chances and did it ever pay off. The lodge was so luxurious, the food was great, the guide was awesome and we practically had the whole place to ourselves! The first 2 nights another couple was there with us but we spent the last 2 nights on our own!

We did 2 game drives a day and they each lasted about 3 hours….since we were on the animal’s timeline, we were woken up super early at 5:30am and did our second drive at 4:00pm. During the day we could relax and swim in their pool enjoying the first super hot weather of the trip.

You basically just drive around and hope you run into things…not much more to it than that. We saw almost every animal they have: elephants, lions, zebras, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, various antelopes, monkeys, baboons, tons of different birds etc!

Lion paw prints in the sand,

Last week's lion victim.

Rhino family.

 We had a few particularly amazing experiences. The first night we arrived, a herd of upwards of 30 elephants from huge adult males to little babies went roaming right past our camp.

The entire camp is situated over a riverbed and the whole herd meandered past over the course of several hours about 20 feet from us. We were sitting having dinner literally right beside them and could hear them chewing on grass the whole time. We basically had dinner with the elephants! The moon was full that night to so we got a great view of it all.

Dinner with the elephants....sorry, it was just by moonlight so bad lighting!

We saw a momma rhino and her baby wander right past us, we watched hippos bath and had multiple close encounters with elephants too.

On the morning of the second day, we drove right into a huge 2-300 head herd of African Cape buffalos. The guide said that lions will often follow behind and wait for the old males at the back who can no longer keep up and tend to head off on their own to branch off then hunt. 

On our way back to camp, after a couple hours driving around, we spotted two of the old buffalo eating grass in the river right beside our camp…later that afternoon, a couple of the workers in the camp came in to tell us they spotted two male lions just on the other side of the river. We went to investigate, and saw the two buffalo still grazing and a large male lion hiding super stealth in the trees by the banks…waiting.

Two lone buffalos....one of these soon to be lion dinner.

Hiding in the bushes......

That evening we attempted to sneak up and spot him again….we were following our guide on foot when we hear this loud growl from behind the trees in front of us! He cocks the rifle and keeps saying “back away, back away, back away” …we walked right into him and he was warning us to clear out. So scary!

The next morning at the end of our drive, we are coming back towards the river bank and the trees are FILLED with vultures, they are circling the skies as well…right at the bottom of the hill beside river is the lion with his buffalo he just killed. He must have done it while we were out driving.

Vultures...waiting....

We sat and watched him eat for a while and then came back the next morning to find not only him, but two female lions and four cubs. We watched them for about 2 hours. He had literally eaten almost that entire huge buffalo…there was almost nothing left of it but bones and skin but he wasn’t letting the females lions anywhere near it. He would growl and swipe at them is they even tried…he tolerated the baby cubs chewing on it a bit as long as they stayed away from him.

Eventually after eating 95% of that buffalo, he collapsed to sleep his food coma away and the females dove in with the cubs to eat the remainder….and it was smelling pretty ripe at this point!! It was the most incredible thing to watch and were parked about 30feet from the show then whole time.