The underbelly of an elephant

After farewelling Andrew we flew back to J'berg (with a slight detour via Uganda). We only had one week before our flight to Malaysia, so decided to do one last safari in Kruger. The thing we really wanted to do was attempt a self drive safari. So we hired a little Honda Jazz (brand new.... great for going around a national park) and headed off for 5 last days in the African bush. Natually without a guide and not really knowing where to drive we weren't expecting too much in the way of wildlife sightings, so we were pretty impressed when after the first 33minutes we had seen 4 of the big 5. (It took until the next day to see a leopard).

We loved it!! If we come back to Africa we would definitely choose to do a self-drive safari over a tour. There is something extraordinary about viewing the underbelly of an elephant. One day as we were driving along one of the narrower roads in Kruger with dense bush on either side we saw a huge bull elephant walking along the road towards us. The last turn off was 10km behind us, so we decided to pull as far to the side as possible and wait with the car in reverse ready to run at the first sign of trouble. As he got closer our heart rates increased and we really wished we knew exactly how you tell if an elephant is about to charge. About 2m from us he flapped his ears and gave us a look and as he came in line with the car he gave his head a little shake and gave just a little trumpet. Our hearts were in our throats, but he just continued past the car as we looked out our window directly in line with the underside of his belly.... just amazing!!! Another highlight was the leopard that we and only we saw.

This is the only safari that we have kept a list of the animals we saw so in 5 days we saw: lions, leopards, cheetahs, rhino, nile crocodiles, zebra, giraffe, spotted hyena, chacma baboons, vervet monkeys, buffalo, warthog, elephant, hippos, common duiker, sable, bushbuck, klipspringer, mountain reedbuck, common reedbuck, impala, grey rhebok, Sharpe's grysbok, waterbuck, blue wilderbeest, steenbok, nyala, kudu, tree squirrel, orbi, dwarf mongoose, slender mongoose, honey badger, white-headed vulture, secretary bird, martial eagle, wahlberg's eagle, african fish-eagle,barn owl and a 38 further species of birds.

We hadn't however realised quite how lucky we had been until we returned to the hostel and spoke to other people who had also done 5 day safaris (the same days of us). One group saw no big cats at all, and the other person who was on an organised tour saw leopard eyes a long way away at night and two lions about 200m away in the day and that was it. So, I'm not sure whether our love of Kruger is biased by how much we saw.