Kruger Park

When I first came here to Africa and was on the bus driving through South Africa to get to Moçambique, I was really hoping to see some wild animals.  My dream was for the bus to have to stop to let a herd of elephants across, and have lions jumping on the side of my window trying to attack.  Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything but cows then, and even since being here I haven’t seen anything to exotic except for one monkey tied to a rope in someones yard.  Yesterday, that all changed!

I got to spend yesterday in South Africa at the famous Kruger Park.  If anyone hasn’t heard of the YouTube video called “Battle at Kruger”, you need to go check it out now and be amazed!!  We stayed with some friends of the Bowers who are South African.  I was able to see a ton of awesome animals.  Africa has what are called “The Big Five”, which include Elephant, Rhino, Buffalo, Leopard, and Lion.  The ultimate is seeing all of them in one trip.  We saw 3, which isn’t bad, especially since we saw the 2 rarest.  We also had a little friendly competition amongst ourselves, where we picked the animals before hand and rated them with point values, and the first person to positively identify an animal would get that amount of point in Rand (SA currency) to use at the gift shop at the end of the day.  When you are driving around the park, you often know when there is something exciting when you see cars stopped and people leaning out the windows with cameras.  At one point we hit a major traffic jam and it was because there was a leopard lying down under a tree about 150 ft away.  That was pretty awesome to see, but what was cooler was later in the day we were driving over a bridge and saw another one drinking water around this little pond by itself and I think we were the only ones to see it.  It was REALLY close too.   We also saw about 5 lions, all lying down and not right in our faces, but it was an awesome time!  I also won the identifying game!

Classic giraffe with birds on the back

South African braai (BBQ), they know how to cook my style!  MEAT!

Some monkeys

This is amazing!  There are a total of 450 cheetah’s in Kruger Park.  Kruger Park is bigger than the UK.  Cheetah’s generally hunt alone.  We saw TWO walking away after feasting on a recent kill.  I was going crazy!  They were literally 10ft away.

We had to back up in fear that it would come charge us