South African Honeymoon

Thursday, August 28 (cont.)

After about a 45-minute drive, we arrive at the Malenane gate to enter Kruger Park on the south end.

Before we've even driven 200 yards into the park, we see a baboon in a tree off to our left, and we know we're out in the wilderness.

Not much farther up, we see some Nyala just a bit off the road - luckily we bought a book to help us figure out what all these animals are called.

We were really excited when we saw our first impala. After seeing several hundred over the next couple of days, we didn't even bother to mention them. These guys were all over the place - there must be more of them than any other animal in the park.

Wildebeest are ugly, but still pretty cool to see up close in the wild.

We were surprised at the number of zebra we saw too. Not nearly as many of them as the impalas, but we got to see a lot. And you never really get tired of seeing zebra, with their cool stripes and punk mohawks.

This is the first time we actually had animals cross the road right in front of our car - zebra and wildebeest. This is easily the coolest part of being in Kruger -- the fact that you are right out in the open with all these wild animals, with nothing between you and them but a car door. As long as you stay on the road and in your car (with a few exceptions), you're free to go anywhere in the park at your own pace. It's hard to put into words how cool this is.
I don't normally like having things in my pictures like mirrors and doors and dashboards. But in a lot of these pics, I had to leave them in the photos, just to give some perspective to how close we were to everything.

Our first elephant sighting was amazing. We came over a hill, onto a bridge, and when the view opened up on our left, there were more than a dozen of them grazing and standing around. In this first pic, you can see a tiny baby one next to his mother.