Kruger Holidays
The end of the month of spring sees my family and me taking an eagerly awaited holiday to the Kruger National Park. We haven’t been to the Park for a holiday as a unit for many years, a bizarre phenomenon since we live literally on its doorstep. I offer no excuse, except perhaps that it’s the same as many Londoners never having visited Buckingham Palace. Yet it’s no strange place to me; my earliest memory of a Kruger holiday takes me to Skukuza where, as a mere lad, standing in front of Harry Wolhuter’s lion skin mounted in the Stevenson-Hamilton Memorial Library held my imagination captive for a long time. I was young and small and the colossal lion skin towering above me seemed like a giant rug draped on the wall. How could an ordinary man possibly have killed such a beast?
A few years later in 1986 we stayed in the newly constructed Berg-en-Dal rest camp in Kruger’s mountainous south. Detracting from the historical rest camp designs of large circles of thatched rondawels such as Skukuza, Pretoriuskop, Letaba and Satara, Berg-en-dal’s accommodation units were built of face-brick and laid out in small clusters offering more privacy from your fellow travellers. The times had changed. Traditionally, a communal fire was kept lit at the centre of each of each circle of the aforementioned rondawels by the camp hand and he’d hang a large kettle of water over the coals providing a perpetual supply of boiling water. It was at these fires that the genial ‘Kruger Parkers’ of old would gather to chat at the day’s end to compare sightings, recount bush anecdotes and swap recipes such was the inescapable sense of community back then. I recall from that trip spooking a lone buffalo bull wallowing in a small pool of water on the camp’s fence. He burst out of the water at my approach giving me the fright of my life and imprinting in me the respect for him which I still have to this day.
We’ll be hooking up with life-long friends from Joburg, themselves long time visitors to the Kruger. As a kid, I’d always mock the old oomie in his bakkie with its canopy boasting his collection of Kruger Park camp stickers who queued at the camp gate an hour or so before they opened so he could claim the first sightings of the morning. Well, don’t look now but my Joburg mate has become the very same oomie who goads and hectors his family out of bed long before even the crested francolins have called the sun rise so he can be the first at the gate. I don’t know how but they love him nonetheless. Our trip is taking us north primarily where the bosky mopanie-veld dominates the landscape. I look forward to the elephant sightings and spending some quiet time with grumpy old dagga boys.
While the beginning of summer has brought warmer daytime temperatures, the early mornings are still chilly and the cheeky nip in the dawn air makes a matutinal cup of coffee all the more comforting. I look forward to compiling a trip birding list which is often to the irritation of my family who, to my everlasting dismay, can barely tell a roller from a kingfisher. But on I shall persevere in the hope that I may instil some aviculture into my familial philistines. Bless…
And so on to the afternoon sundowner where we sip on ubiquitous gin and tonics or ice cold beers when the orange sun burns low on the horizon while the camp fire crackles and spits sparks in the background. The setting couldn’t be more quintessentially Kruger and I wouldn’t want to alter it for the world. It really is a magical place.
