The final week of my African Adventure was spent in the Kruger National Park. We had found a company called Tydon Safaris, based just outside Kruger Park. It is classed as a tented camp - but the tents are the most luxurious I have ever been in, being at least as comfortable and well appointed as any en suite guest room. And the position is ideally chosen, allowing alternate days to be spent in the Kruger National Park and in the private reserves of the Sabi Sands. The food is good, the guides are excellent, and they will taylor the safaris to your desires - if you want a safari in southern Kruger, this is a great place. So much for the advert - but it is really good.
We were picked up in Johannesburgh by Jackie, one of the guides, and on the way collected Bryony and her husband Tim at Nelspruit - they had spent a few days walking in the Drakensburg Mountains.
Even after we had picked them up, it was still quite a long drive to get to the camp. Once there, we just had long enough to get settled into the tents before we were off on our first drive - an evening drive into Sabi Sands. There are three advantages to being able to use the private reserves as well as the main national reserve - the vehicles are more open, you can drive off road, and you can stay in the park until later in the evening. This means that on the days you are in Sabi Sands you stop for a sundowner - getting out of the car for a drink, some snacks, and a chance to watch an African sunset.
We arrived back in camp in time for the evening meal - and the first one was a traditional braai. The evenings are certainly a feature of the stay at Tydon - all the meals are traditional Africaans fair, and the guides stay with you for the whole evening - so that you end up telling tales around the camp fire. Mind, we did not stay up too late - whatever you are doing, the day begins at five.
On the days in the main park in Kruger there are drives in the morning and the afternoon - returning to the camp for a light midday meal. Because Kruger is public land the rules in the park are tighter than on the private reserves - the vehicles are more enclosed, you have to stay on the tracks at all times, and there are only a few places where you can get out of the vehicles apart from the main lodges. But there is a much larger area to explore, and a much greater variety of terrain to be found, so that on any one day you are more likely to see a greater variety of animals.
Of course, everybody wants to see the 'Big Five' - the main traditional game animals, and in the old days the ones that were the most dangerous to hunt. These are: lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and buffalo. But there are so many more animals to see than these, and in the time we were there we saw most of them - the only conspicuous missing sightings were the cheetah and the painted dog (both quite rare sightings).
Probably the most frequently sighted are the impala - the antelope that is the logo of the park, and is also frequently a meal for the big preditors. But on our drives in Kruger we saw so much - including baboons that had worked out how to stop cars and try to get food (they can be quite a nuisance), the strange ground hornbill (somewhat threatened because too many elephants push over too many of the trees they would normally nest in), and beautiful Nile monitors.
Of the times in Kruger, two events stand out. The first was the opportunity to spend time with a lioness and three cubs - two of her own, and one older one she was fostering to allow the other mother to join the pack and go hunting. She was on one side of the road, and we were on the other, and we sat and watched the group for quite some time, until the cubs decided it was time to wake mum up and get her moving. The second was going to the bird hide on one of the lakes in the park. This was a beautiful and quiet place, with only eight cars allowed to park at any one time. The main animals there were hippos and weaver birds, but the most unusual was probably the goliath crane. This was a beautiful and serene spot, and our last stop on our second day in the national park.
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