After 6 months of traveling and not having a chance to see any of my friends from back home it was awesome to be reunited with one of my best buds. Our first week in South Africa was a complete blitz. Artem and I left Richard’s Bay and drove toward Kruger on the December 1st. We stayed a night in a hostel near Blyde River Canyon, a massive canyon on the western edge of Kruger, and then went exploring the following day. We took some 4×4 trails up the backside of the canyon, found a seemingly abandoned air force base, and got a private viewing of the canyon while having some beers with the security guard.
Backside of Blyde River Canyon
Blyde River Canyon’s ‘World’s End’
The next day we drove to Kruger and spent two days driving around looking at wild ass animals. We did it all in our own car so had total freedom of where to go and what parts of the park to see. Among the more exciting things that happened were getting charged by a mother elephant because we accidentally got between her and her baby, watching three lions eat a small elephant and then defend their kill from a pack of hyenas, and watching a leopard drink water just 10 feet from our car.
Leopard just off the road at dawn
Herd of buffalo
Giraffe on the savannah
I had no idea what to expect going in to this safari but it was really mind blowing. The entire time I felt like I was in a wildlife documentary and David Attenborough should be narrating everything we saw.
After two days we’d seen pretty much every animal (except the cheetah) that there is in park; loins, leopards, buffalo, rhinos, elephants, wildebeest, foxes, giraffes, warthogs, hyenas, ostriches, impalas, waterbuck, kudu, hippos, zebras and probably a lot more that I’m forgetting.
we headed out of the park and to Chimp Eden, a chimp rescue center funded by Jane Goodall. I’ll write a whole other post about that but suffice it to say it was extremely interesting, sad, and surreal all at the same time.