My adult daughter and I recently completed in September 2023 a self-guided trip for 12 d in Kruger park, South Africa. Because I really appreciate the experience and insights of folk on the RS travel forum I thought a summary of our trip might be useful for those interested in doing the same.
We started our trip from the west coast of Canada by stopping in London for 4d to get over jet lag. Then we flew to Johannesburg and caught a local airliner flight into Skukuza airport in Kruger park. Book the afternoon flight into Skukuza if arriving from Europe; We almost missed our 1000 flight as we were 1.5 hr late leaving LHR! As an aside, the layover is worth it going out to Africa as the trip home was 42hr door-to-door!! It took me a week to recover…
In Skukuza we picked up a little 4-door 2wheel drive Toyota booked thru Avis. We ended up putting on 1500km on the vehicle. It was totally adequate for the trip. Operated fine on the tar and gravel roads and we could skoot around the occasional cat-jam. Appreciated the ac!
We stayed 12 nights in 4 different park restcamps: Bergendal, crocodile, lower Sabie, and Satara. All accommodations were basic with a full kitchen on outside and beds/bathroom on inside. We did appreciate the AC as temperatures ranged from low 30s to 41C. Each rest camp had a least one restaurant, a gas station and a general shop for food supplies and souvenirs, and a swimming pool and laundry. If you are a foodie you won’t like the meals. But you are here for the wildlife and not the food!! We wouldn’t recommend lower Sabie because of the bat houses and subsequent smell and …. The other 3 were fine.
At each rest camp we did partake in a 3hr early morning park-led game drive that left before sunrise. - would recommend as you sit nice and high and get great light for photography. Wouldn’t recommend the night drives, at least from a photography perspective. We would typically plan a self-guided driving route for the next day based on talking to others, reading the rest camp sightings board, and referring to a fabulous book “ Kruger self-drive” by van den Berg. For 90% of the time we did not have any issues with too many cars or ‘traffic’. On occasion there would be a massive pile of vehicles stopped at a lion sighting but we could usually sneak through the cat-jam in our little car!
The general thinking that you need a guide to find/see wildlife in Kruger is nonsense. The main reason the guides find wildlife quickly is that they talk to each other over the radio and then zoom over to the sighting! You yourself need to spend some time driving slowly with your eyes and ears open and sudden wonderful wildlife surprises happen around the next bend! We saw 8 separate lion prides feeding on kills (mainly Cape buffalo), 6 separate sightings of cheetah (including the 3 brothers), 4 separate sightings of leopards (including a female with 2 kittens and daddy!) and about 12 rhinos, etc. We kept a head count of the animals we saw by day and road and every day was fantastic: herds of elephants, massive herds of impala, zebra, giraffes galore, hippos, hyenas, yadayada. I guess if you only have 1 or 2 days in Kruger then a guided trip is the way to go!!
We ended out self drive with a 3-d walking safari offered by a lodge in Kruger. Very different and wonderful to have boots on the ground. Accommodations and food were fabulous and about 4 times the daily cost of a self-drive. The biggest down side to the lodge was the dead time after the morning game drive/breaky and the afternoon feeding/ game drive. Great if you want to sit and read or swim but too much idle time for us! In all, I was very satisfied with the self drive and would recommend it over a lodge at least in Kruger. The only issue we would want to resolve is buying food outside the park as your choice can be limited at the rest camps. I hope this short summary is helpful as I couldn’t find any recent info here in the trip report sect