I guess it’s time to start blogging! With lack of internet and motivation it’s hard to get my head into the space to write but I’ll give it a go!

From Johannesburg we headed straight for Nelspruit, a town near Kruger where we could rent a car. Seeing as we couldn’t ride Betsy through Kruger (as much as we’d love to!) we decided to hire a car and do a ‘self drive’ safari. It’s one of the only parks you can do this in Africa and also the cheapest way.

As we were doing it on the cheap we took our tent and booked a couple of nights in a couple of different sites in the park.

We were pretty excited driving into Kruger and over the two days we saw herds of elephants, giraffe, zebra, impala, wildebeest, buffalo, warthog and antelope.

We also saw rhinos, hippos and the best of all, a lion!

It’s amazing seeing these animals in the wild, I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t in a zoo! Prior to going to Kruger we had been told that it was over run with people and whenever you see an animal there will be at least 10 other cars there with you. While this was true at times we were also totally alone on many occasions… we decided to veer off the main road at one point and take a dirt road to our campsite. Whilst travelling at the usual 20/hour looking from side to side I glanced at the road ahead and saw a lion laying in the middle of the road. I was so excited and speechless I just started hitting Dean and pointing.

We both screamed and dean quickly closed our windows. I was hoping to see a lion but having one on the road in front of us with no one else around seemed like a dream! He just layed there watching us, looking around and yawning. So so cool! It was so tempting to lean out the window to take a photo but I couldn’t risk being one of those stupid people you read about… We had no way of getting past him and he seemed pretty content lying there so we just stared and waited. He eventually got up and strode away. We felt so lucky to have experienced that moment totally alone with a lion.

We made it to the camp just as the gates were closing for the night and ended up staying in a round thatched cabin. The next day we set out at 6.30am and drove until 5.30pm😳 We had another private interlude but this time with an elephant. We saw a lone elephant by the side of the road so I pulled over to watch him…. he then started walking straight for us…in hind site it was possibly a dangerous situation which I should have reversed out of but it was too exciting to leave so we stayed there with the windows down staring…as he got closer and closer we got a little nervous as he could have easily crushed the car or nudged us out of the way but luckily he decided to walk past…again, we were totally alone 😁

There was so much amazing wildlife in the park, and we had a fantastic time. We saw more than we expected to see and all up it cost us less than $300. We have a few other safaris pencilled in over the next couple of months so it will be interesting to see the difference of doing it on our own versus being guided.

Feeling very blessed 💕