The enormous and magnificent
Kruger National Park is one of the most popular game parks in the
world. It covers a significant chunk of South Africa - from the Crocodile
River in Mpumalanga in the south to the Zimbabwe border in the Limpopo
Province in the north.
On its entire eastern side is the border with Mozambique. Recently
there has been progress in extending this wilderness region as part
of a trans-frontier park with Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
The fences between borders and those between the private
game reserves on the fringes of Kruger have been taken down now to form
the Greater Kruger National Park. This gives the animals a much larger
area within which to migrate. With an area of around 24 000 sq km
it’s roughly the size of Israel. Its density of permanent game
is unrivalled by any other park in Africa. There are hundreds of different
species of birds, mammals, reptiles, fish and amphibians. Sighting
the Big Five has become something of a quest for many people when
on safari, and the Kruger National Park has more than its fair share
of these. There are an estimated 1 800 lion, 9 000 elephant, 25 000 buffalo,
an unknown number of leopards and 2 300 black and white rhino.
The park was first proclaimed in 1898 as the Sabie Game Reserve by
Paul Kruger, then president of the Transvaal Republic. The first
motorists entered the park in 1927 for a fee of one British pound.
Since then Kruger has received hundreds of thousands of visitors each
year and the park has excellent facilities, with an excellent network
of roads and game-viewing waterholes. The camps have every amenity, from shops to banks to Laundromats, and can accommodate up to
5 000 people per day. That's not including the luxury camps in the
private reserves.
Occasionally it gets crowded, with many vehicles parked around the
same pride of lion. But with a 2 600 kilometre road network there
are plenty of opportunities to go out into the bush. The subtropical
climate has hot rainy summers starting in October and ending around
March. The summer rains transform the arid park into a lush flowering
paradise, but the long grass makes animals harder to see. The best
time for game viewing is in winter when the vegetation becomes sparse
and the animals congregate around the permanent water.
Read more about the Kruger National Park on our Go2Africa website.
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