We picked up our hired 4x4 and drove to the Crocodile Bridge rest camp, just south of the Kruger and close to the border with Mozambique. We’d decided to stay a few nights here and do self-drive trips into the Kruger, and then to treat ourselves to a couple of nights in a private game lodge within the park. The accommodation at Crocodile Bridge was pretty basic, but from our bungalow we had an amazing view across the mostly dried-out river bed to the edge of the park and were lucky enough to be overlooking a hippo pool. For most of the day they were barely noticeable in the pool, save for the odd grunt, with just their noses poking out of the water. Each evening, however, as regular as clockwork we were treated to a grand procession as they moved from our pool to another spot further down the river bed.

Safari means very early mornings, as you try to catch the animals making the most of the cool weather before the sun gets too high. Our first morning we arrived at the nearest gate as it was opening while the sun rose at 5.30am, and got no further than a few hundred metres into the park before we had to stop and let a pack of wild dogs (apparently quite a rare sighting) cross the road in front of us. We found that as you got further from the gates you could easily find yourselves the only car around, and were surprised at how many animals seemed to like hanging out by the roads. In fact, having to stop while a family of elephants or a pair of zebra crossed the road turned out to be quite a regular occurrence. At one point, we had to back up to give way to a huge rhino who, thankfully, was not the least bit interested in us.

After our morning drives, we had a few hours to entertain ourselves before heading back into park for another drive before it closed for the night. It gave us a chance to explore the nearby towns, and also to visit a cheetah sanctuary which was a great opportunity to get close up to the graceful cats, under threat from poachers and farmers.

Not all of the animals in the Kruger face the same problems, in fact the elephants in the park are more like to be the victims of a cull rathern than a poacher. The growing elephant population is believed by some to pose a risk to the biodiversity of the park, and one drastic solution that has been proposed is a cull of 6,500 animals (around 50% of the current population).

We didn’t actually see any cats on our self-drives, despite scanning every tree for leopards, and we did go through periods of very little to see, but the anticipation of what could be round the next bend makes it very addictive, and the excitement you feel when you spot for yourself a giraffe stripping the leaves off a tree in the distance makes you forget the lean spells.