Verbiage and photographs cannot prepare you for the Kruger National Park. It is quite possibly Africa's most overwhelming spectacle of wildlife and landscape combined, every bit the safari fantasy evoked when children imagine this continent. Animals are not just dotted around the scenery; they flow in huge numbers in all places. It is impossible to drive more than a few minutes without seeing some marvel of nature.
Impressive as it is, the classic, country-sized Kruger is only a fraction of the park's area. Fringing all of its margins on the South African side are innumerable and gigantic private reserves boosting their wildlife viewing opportunities by mere proximity. To enter Kruger proper, visitors drive between these reserves with ample opportunity to sight overspilling game on the quiet highways leading into the National Park.
Many of these reserves have no or poorly maintained fences and are essentially contiguous with the open wilderness of South Africa's secret 10th province (though technically the park is a shared venture between the provincial governments of Mpumalanga and Limpopo). The tourist trade for wealthy safari regulars and photographers looking for easy leopard and lion shots at these reserves is a major boon to the South African economy.
Incredibly, even this isn't the whole park - for the Transfrontier Reserve project in fact extends the Kruger by a factor of nearly three times this size by combining it with the enormous Gonarezhou National Park and the Limpopo National Park in Zimbabwe and Mozambique respectively. Wildlife roams freely across these borders and the flow of tourist dollars, research and protection opportunities theoretically enjoy synergistic prosperity.
Several well-known gates afford access into the park itself. We entered through the Orpen Gate near Acornhoek and over a week made our winding way down past the familiar safari camp names of Satara, Tshokwane and Skukuza to near the southeastern Numbi gate at Pretoriuskop, our future exit into the township sprawl of Bhekiswayo and Hazy View adjacent to the reserves.
The drive over to the Kruger from the typical starting point of Johannesburg takes you through the coal spoils and industrialised highveld of the East Rand, across the potholed, craggy landscape of the Drakensberg, past God's Window and onto Mpumalanga's rolling farmland. The roads are very well maintained, though self drivers should exercise caution approaching particularly the southern aspect of the Kruger in a country where banditry and violent carjackings are all too common. Once inside the National Park, though, personal safety becomes essentially limited to keeping your camp safe from marauding animals.
We slipped into Kruger (although truth be told it's hard to know when you're actually in the official park) and made our way up to the winter's dry bed of the Timbavati River that delineates the margin of the National Park with the huge eponymous private reserve to the west. The Maroela camp is an understated affair, ringed by fence on three sides but otherwise open to the baboons and hyenas. We pitched our tent on the parched sandy ground and headed straight back out for the evening light.
Almost immediately we ran into a small group of Chacma Baboons skirting the edges of a herd of Blue Wildebeest, settled down in the dust for a peaceful moment of quiet respite before the descent of the night's horrors. The wildebeest, striped and edged in Kruger's characteristic tan dust, rose periodically to square off against one another before settling back down into increasingly large groups.
Paused watching the herds foment, it took a good five minutes before we noticed, stock still but mere metres away, a towering giant in the form of a South African Giraffe stood silently by the vehicle. Giraffes, in their vertical feeding configuration, blend almost seamlessly into the landscape and can be genuinely difficult to spot, particularly the dark patched denizens of the country's Northern provinces.
Turning to address our stifled gasp at missing one of the land's largest mammals so close, we soon realised there were others pacing the landscape. In fact, a few days of being in rural Southern Africa will attune your eyesight to pick out all sorts of goodies from the thorn tree and waving grassland backdrop that hides virtually all of Africa's iconic animals exceedingly well.
Picking what foliage it could from the vicious needle-strewn branches, the closest giraffe stood daydreaming as it slowly chewed through the leaves. Occasionally a shuffle in its enormous legs, a glimpse into the odd, robotic motion of these living lamp posts. We marveled a little more before skirting the evening road back to Maroela for the evening meal, bypassing the wildebeest once more and their newfound friends in the form of a herd of Impala.
After dinner the night hit the veld like a sledgehammer. Wandering up to the back fence, we encountered weird whooping noises new to us at the time and in hindsight now suspected to be part of the cacophony of twisted laughter beloved of hyenas prowling fencelines. A harsh bark - a baboon - was interrupted by the most fearsome of all African sounds; the unmistakable, repetitive low key roaring of a lion. The sound was very close, but the instigator remained just out of sight.
Kruger is a truly wild place at night. Visitors are kept secured in compounds by SANPark authorities - partly as an anti-poaching measure, and partly to avoid lion and elephant related...accidents. Screeching birds, rumbling mammals and the humid claustrophobia of a wall of black noise defines nights here. In the absence of the moon, you can't see anything but the brilliant Southern starfields.
There's a magical hour or so after sunrise enjoyed on campgrounds around Southern Africa. The air is cooler, indeed sometimes with moisture lingering. It can be cold in the winter and the early morning ritual of sitting in a camp chair in a fleece jacket or gilet nursing a cup of chicory coffee and a rusk is a unique safari pleasure. The anticipation of the day's sightings is fresh, and the night's predators can be spotted skulking back to rest for the day.
We headed out on a loop that took us North briefly, then down on the road to Satara. A small group of Waterbuck were sighted rising up from the perfectly blended grassland, perhaps in anticipation of us but more likely in edgy caution to the spotted hyena pacing some distance away. Even a lone hyena can be a threat to unwary antelope.
Impala flung themselves across the road in great herds, always desperate to get the equally bleached grass on the other side. As they did so a huge giraffe broke cover and slowly strode across the tarmac to the amazement of all. The height of a wild giraffe is difficult to appreciate unless you're close up, but out in the open with vehicles for reference it's incredible that such animals exist at all.
This one paused for a while, mouthing discarded bones on the ground at an old kill site. Giraffes are thought to do this to gather calcium and other minerals in the bushveld where salts and minerals can be hard won. It is an incongruous sight to see a known herbivore munching down on bone. In short order he went back to ripping leaves off the trees a small group of zebras joined him.
Giraffes are an iconic and immediately recognisable animal of course, but their classification has been the subject of intense debate in the zoology community, and remains far from settled. Far from being the universal towering African canopy specialist, giraffes are scattered across Africa in severely fragmented pockets divided into a number of subspecies. Some of these subspecies are exceedingly rare and conservation groups fear for their survival over the next few decades.
Most authorities recognise the Northern and Southern Giraffes, split across the Northern and Southern regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. Most also subdivide these into at least six subspecies, some seven and some nine depending on who you listen to. Patches and patterns vary considerably across the subspecies, as do height, behaviour and geographical distribution.
The South African Giraffe is one of the more common subspecies but is found in a surprisingly narrow distribution across South Africa, Zimbabwe and portions of Namibia and Botswana. The closely related Angolan Giraffe with its paler legs and face is hard to distinguish due to the age related changes in colour intensity common to all giraffes.
Surprisingly, in Namibia alone only four percent of giraffes are now wild. In Zambia that number has been a little higher, but in Zimbabwe and Botswana the populations have been slashed in the last decade. In South Africa the number is more confusing due to the prevalence of the subspecies in huge National Parks, however there are certainly many on small private game reserves across the country as the boundaries between wild and captive or extensively managed game animals become blurred.
Giraffes are also an uncommon and expensive meat on the biltong and game meats market, and are a frequent casualty in the appalling trophy hunting industry that has proliferated in a number of African countries. Their main pull remains, however, gasping safari tourists excited to see these giants. Predators rarely bother with the effort involved in taking out an adult giraffe, but lions in particular will have a go in times of need at young giraffes and with enough persistence can bring down the weak and frail.
As we drew near to Satara we encountered a very dark male giraffe leaning in close to the truck. Male giraffes become darker in pattern the older they get, and sometimes can lose much of their characteristic reticulated patterning. This individual was broadly uninterested in our presence allowing us to get much closer than is typical.
Giraffes aren't terribly fussy about the leaves they pick, but they are voracious and need to wander constantly in the daylight hours to take in as much food as possible. Their high altitude dietary preferences allow them to coexist with a wide variety of antelope and zebras relatively uneventfully and both giraffes and zebras are frequently sighted together - some have postulated this is for additional protection from predation.
The roads around Satara are flush with shallow drinking holes and pans. Grey lumps in the form of sleeping hippos were a distraction until we caught sight of that most spectacular of all giraffe behaviour - the simple act of drinking. So pressurised is the blood traveling up the neck of a giraffe that they can't bend for any length of time and so must perform a surprisingly graceful ducking ceremony to garner even a small amount of water.
It is also the time when they are most vulnerable - indeed a time when lions may ambush them from behind. There were no such worries here in the midday sun, but crocodiles are a permanent threat in water bodies throughout National Parks. The giraffe stooped slowly, eyeing the surface for even the slightest disruption. Oxpeckers stood sentry tending open sores on the long neck, fluttering around the huge giraffe as if roosting in a tree.
Water acquired, we stayed a while appreciating the splendour of this truly magical procession of animals taking turns at the waterhole. In the winter midday is a time for the more vulnerable to come down to the water's edge, though the real action starts in the late afternoon. We moved away and rolled into the gated compound at Satara in preparation for the next splendid moment to be seared into our memories for a lifetime - such is the impression of Africa's great mammals.
All photography © Chris Milligan Photo. All views are my own. Seek local recommendations before photographing or approaching any wildlife.
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