Kruger National Park in South Africa is a wonderful place. If you like the outdoors and wild animals, this is already on your list to visit, or should be. I just spent 6 days and 5 nights there and am compiling all the photos, videos and stories for future posts! My first post is about Kruger Park animal crossings.
Driving Kruger Park
One of the unique things about Kruger National Park is that visitors drive along the roads looking for wild animals. The park is the animals’ home so humans are not supposed to walk around except in camps or with guides. Drive slowly so you don’t miss an animal, and so you don’t miss a car suddenly stopping in front of you because the driver has just seen an animal! Sometimes you don’t even need to look for animals, because they just decide to cross the road immediately in front of you.
Here are a few examples of animal crossings in Kruger National Park last week:
Buffalo Crossing
Wild buffalo are very cool imposing creatures. They look almost medieval. When these cross the road, we wait for them. Buffalo are one of the famed “Big Five” so it’s exciting to see them, even when they are in the way.*
*Please note: all talk of being inconvenienced by animal crossings is tongue in cheek! We loved it!
Elephant Crossing
There are a lot of elephants in Kruger Park. We saw elephants almost every day. However, this video, taken on our next to last day in Kruger, was still unusual. For a long time, more than 5 minutes, herds of elephants continued to cross the road, holding up lots of traffic. It’s a memory I’ll hold on to from our visit to Kruger. I especially loved how the bigger older elephants blocked for the young babies. Charming!
Zebra Crossing
These cute horse-like creatures were frequently blocking our progress, but how could we mind? They are really beautiful!
Bird Crossing
When we drove near a bird sitting in the road, we slowed, thinking it would fly off. Not this one. Apparently, the southern ground hornbill prefers to walk, and this one took its time walking to the other side.
Waterbucks Not Crossing
These antelopes would have stayed in the road forever. Finally, I moved forward and they moved too.
Turtle Crossing
So tiny and cute, we had to wait and make sure the turtle could make it across. This happened a few times and they always made it safely.
Wild Dogs Running Wild in the Street
This pack of wild dogs was very exciting to see because they are very rare. One book puts the number of wild dogs in Kruger Park at only 250. And we saw 5 of them, running wild (!) in the street sniffing for food. They weren’t crossing, they were running right toward us. I closed my passenger window as soon as they appeared, and I was relived I did when they ran super close to the car – and me! Creepy!
More animal sightings in Botswana. What are your favorite animal sightings in the wild?
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Great pics and photos. Keep em coming!!
Thanks to you two, this place is moving up our list of places WE MUST VISIT!!
This is such a bucket list item!! Love this so much! Thanks for sharing! And I loved the videos and photos! What a fun experience!
One of my favorite trips ever! Would go back anytime!
Oh I would absolutely love to visit Kruger National Park and see all these animals in their natural habitat! Thank you for sharing such awesome videos and photos – gotta add it to my bucket list now ????
This looks amazing. I really want to go to SA but not been able to get to there yet. I bet this was amazing to experience
It was amazing! One of my favorite places in the world!
So much wildlife! We would love to do a safari there someday. I love the video of the hornbill crossing the road. He clearly wasn’t in a hurry.
OMG! What an adventure! I was just talking about how wonderful an African Animal Park would be, we definitely need to go. I would love to see the zebras and elephants!