A true first-timer’s guide to a safari field trip with kids in Kruger National Park

Just a short drive away from the sprawling metropolis of Johannesburg, South Africa, Kruger National Park does an amazing job of making budget-friendly safaris accessible for worldschooling families like ours. So accessible, in fact, that it took us less than a day to go from “Maybe we should go on safari” all the way to setting up our tent!

Kruger is located in northeastern South Africa, sharing borders with both Mozambique and Zimbabwe. It is home to a huge variety of wild animals, including all five of the Big 5, various rare and interesting birds, and large herds of smaller game animals. And it’s a super-easy location to visit if you’re interested in doing a self-drive safari.

Self-drive safaris are much cheaper than guided safaris, so discovering that Kruger allows guests to drive themselves instantly meant the difference between being able to afford a safari or not for our family. And since going on a true African safari has been on my family’s list since forever, it meant a trip to Kruger was too good to pass up.

Our overall experience in Kruger National Park

When I first woke up on the Sunday before our safari trip, I had no idea that that very day I would be preparing for a full week of getting up close to some of the most dangerous animals in Africa. Kruger National Park had been on our list of places to consider visiting, but we hadn’t made any real effort to make our trip into a reality.

That all changed when my wife pointed out that she had a relatively open calendar that week and that she wanted to spend some well-deserved time outside. After a few minutes of brain-storming, we realized that we probably wouldn’t get a better chance to visit Kruger, and less than an hour later we were at the store buying a tent!

We ended up spending a total of 5 nights (6 days) inside of Kruger, and almost all of our daylight hours were spent driving the roads between the camps! We saw all 5 of the Big 5, spotted and reported some endangered birds, and even learned a bit about the area’s history.

We had been told that taking at least one guided drive was important if you wanted the best animal sightings, and so we did sign up for 2 guided drives, but our favorite sightings all occurred while we were driving ourselves.

An African safari feels like something that should take a long time to plan and a large budget to pull off, but Kruger National Park surprised us with how easy it was to fit into our time in South Africa,

We decided to do a 5-night stay inside the park, staying at a different rest camp each night. Each day we drove from one camp to the next, doing our best to spot as many animals as we could.

What animals can you find in Kruger National Park?

Kruger is a world-class park for safaris, and many of the African animals that you would want to see on a safari are here.

The animals that most people want to see are, of course, the larger African mammals. Kruger has more than 140 different species of mammal within its park borders, including all five species that make up the Big 5! With that much diversity, it isn’t likely that you’ll see everything in a single trip, but if you keep your eyes out, you’ll be sure to see some amazing things.

What are the Big 5?

 

 

The Big 5 are the 5 most dangerous animals to hunt in Africa. They include lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, and water buffalo. But while these animals may be dangerous to hunt, you don’t really have to worry about them all that much from the safety of your car.

Lions and leopards are so accustomed to visitors that they will almost entirely ignore your car unless it gets right up close to them, and so long as you give the herbivores space, they will also leave you alone. That said, elephants can cause some pretty serious damage to your car if they want to, so do watch their body language for signs of possible aggression and leave space to back off if needed!

Other mammals in Kruger

Apart from the Big 5, Kruger is home to tons of great animals that make it a great place to do a safari with kids. We saw tons of giraffes, usually side by side with herds of zebra. Impala and other deer-like grazers are extremely common, to the point that you almost get tired of seeing them, and many of the watering holes and rivers host large herds of hippos. If you’re really lucky there are even cheetahs!

Smaller mammals are much harder to spot but are also definitely around. Baboons and Vervet monkeys are common, and can often be seen near the camps. While their antics are cute, they have figured out that people mean food, and Vervets especially will break into campsites in search of things to steal.

 

 

Some mammals are harder to spot. We saw two different species of mongoose, a honey badger, and a hare, but missed out on both African Porcupines and Pangolins.

Birds in Kruger National Park

When we decided to go on safari, I didn’t realize how interesting the birds in the park would be. I knew that I wanted to see the big cats and lumbering giants of the savanna, but birdwatching wasn’t on my mind. But from the tiny weaver birds whose nests could be seen everywhere all the way up to the endangered Giant Ground Hornbill, Kruger has tons of fascinating birds for those willing to look for them!

It was the Giant Ground Hornbill that first caught my eye. While we were waiting in line to enter the park, my son pointed at a poster hanging on the wall next to the entry gate. It was a request for guests to report any sightings of the hornbills as a way of helping with conservation efforts. A genuine citizen science opportunity!

 

 

Just like that, the Giant Ground Hornbill, which I previously knew nothing about, immediately became the top animal on my must-see list!

We ended up seeing two separate groups of them during our 5 days at Kruger, but that was just the start as far as birds were concerned. We also spotted several species of owl, bateleur eagles, ox peckers, and secretary birds.

Other animals in Kruger Park

While most of the animals that we saw fell into one of the two categories above, there were a few notable exceptions.

On top of everything else, Kruger is home to a wide variety of reptiles as well. The largest of these is the Nile crocodile, which despite its name, can be found throughout much of Africa. We saw tons of these hanging out at the watering holes. Other notable reptiles include chameleons and the leopard tortoise, which can sometimes be seen alongside the road.

 

 

Unfortunately, there are also mosquitos in the park. Kruger is in a malaria zone, so be sure to bring some bug repellant for the evenings, just in case!

How much does it cost to visit Kruger National Park with kids?

When you think of going on a week of safari, it seems like the sort of thing that would be expensive, and if you insist on the nicest accommodations and guided game drives, it is. But visiting Kruger with kids doesn’t have to break the bank!

Bottom line, for my family of 4, 6 days and 5 nights in Kruger cost us under $1500 USD in all, including all our food, gear, and gas on top of campground reservations and entrance fees.

That doesn’t include transportation to South Africa or the cost of renting a car, since we were already in the country and we borrowed a friend’s car for the trip. But as far as world-class safaris go, I think that’s pretty economical!

Here’s a breakdown of what those costs looked like, so you can know what to expect:

Of course, if you need to add transportation and a rental car to that, the price does go up a bit, but using a flight aggregator tool like Skyscanner can help you find the best prices on tickets and help drive prices down.

If your are renting your car, something a little higher off the ground is better. The extra height allows you to see animals that might otherwise be hidden in the grass.

If you are also renting a car, keep in mind that something a little higher off the ground is better. The extra height allows you to see animals that might otherwise be hidden in the grass.

To keep flying cost-effective, I highly recommend making the most of your stay in South Africa and seeing some of the other wonderful sights in the country! My family absolutely loved our time in Cape Town, and the Drakensburg Mountains area is beautiful.

Check out my other articles on South Africa to get more inspiration for your next African adventure!

A hidden gem for families visiting South Africa – The Drakensbergs

An Amazing Penguin Adventure With Kids At South Africa’s Boulders Beach

The Desolate Prison Island where Nelson Mandela Spent 18 Years

Table Mountain – Visiting An African World Wonder With Kids

15 Amazing Educational South African Adventures for Worldschooling Families

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Should I get a Guided Safari Drive?

If there’s one piece of advice that we’ve received time and time again, it’s that we just had to go on at least one guided drive during our time on safari.

In large part, that’s because the drivers of the park’s vehicles are all in contact with each other and will often know exactly where to go to see the best animals because another driver already told them. They also have a ton of experience spotting animals and may spot something you would have missed.

Both of those reasons are true, but I’m still torn on whether to tell you to get a guide or not.

Our family went on two guided drives during our week at Kruger, and we saw some amazing animals on both drives. But we also managed to find equivalent or better sightings while driving on our own. Even for the guides, it comes down to luck, since the animals rarely stay in the same place for long.

When we drove on our own, we were able to go at our own pace and we often drove much slower than the other cars around us. We could choose what to sit and watch, and what to skip because we’d already seen. With the guided drives, they would often hurry past areas where there hadn’t been a sighting in order to get to where lions or elephants had definitely been spotted. That works, but it left me wondering what we might have missed in getting there. We also spent longer looking at some animals than I needed since everybody wanted pictures, and we hurried past other animals that I might have lingered with.

Still, both guided drives were fun. And we saw lions on both of them!

Ultimately, it comes down to your family’s preferences. I’d suggest scheduling at least one for the sake of the experience.

 

 

Our family’s 5-day itinerary for Kruger National Park

This was my family’s first outing to Kruger, and we had no idea where to begin. A lot of the blogs where we did our research would name all the different camps as possibilities but gave very little real direction as to which camps would work best for us as a family. Add to that the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to predict where the animals are going to be, and planning a spur-of-the-moment 5-day trip felt pretty intimidating.

What we ended up doing was choosing an entrance to the park at the southern end and moving northward from camp to camp according to the listed site availability on SANParks’ reservations website. Each morning we would start by driving slowly to our next campsite spotting animals along the way. We also booked two guided drives through the same reservations site, which turned out to be as simple as checking a box.

For a first-time safari schedule, it ended up working great!

Here’s where we stayed:

Night 1 – Malelane Satelite Camp

The drive to Kruger took us almost 5 hours from Pretoria, so for our first night, we decided to stay just inside the park’s border at Malelane Satelite Camp. I didn’t know it at the time, but Malelane is significantly different from the other camps that we stayed in, and it ended up being my favorite night in the park!

For one thing, Malelane is a satellite camp, not a rest camp. That meant there wasn’t a store or a restaurant within the camp’s fence, and it felt exactly like camping should. A fence encircled the entire camp to keep the animals out, so there wasn’t any worry over nocturnal visitors, and I ended up staying up late taking pictures of the stars and listening to the hippos calling up from the river below us.

We didn’t expect much in the way of animals this close to the edge of the park, but we ended up seeing elephants, giraffes, and rhinos all within a few miles of the camp, and we heard that there were several leopard sightings in that same area the day after we left!

 

 

Night 2 – Skukuza Rest Camp

On our first full day of safari, our first stop was the Berg-en-dal Rest Camp to the north, for gas before beginning the long, slow drive up to Skukuza Rest Camp.

We had heard somewhere that the mark of a veteran Kruger visitor is driving your car at speeds of no more than 25 kph, and that worked out pretty well for us. Within the first hour or so of driving, we had already spotted both elephants and rhinos! All of our rhino sightings happened on this leg of our trip, but they came so easily that we didn’t realize they were somewhat rare sightings until later.

We also decided to take the Mlambane loop on our way north, as a way of getting off the main road. That decision led us to our first lion sighting in the park! In fact, a lot of our most interesting sightings happened when we took detours off the main roads. If you have the time and the inclination, definitely take advantage of the loops.

Around mid-morning, we stopped in at the Tindlovu Picnic area (marker 3 above) for a restroom and snack break. There’s no camping at that site, but they do have a cafe and a store, which made it a welcome stop. (Try the rooibos latte!)

Continuing northward, we arrived at Skukuza and set up camp.

Skukuza is the largest of the Rest Camps in Kruger and functions as something of a headquarters for the area. Apart from the campsites, they have a couple of different restaurant options in the camp, a large store where you can get bush meat for grilling, a swimming pool, and a library/museum!

The amenities are definitely nice, but the trade-off is that the campsites felt crowded. There weren’t as many trees for shade, and our site was well away from the camp’s edge, meaning we couldn’t do any evening wildlife watching through the fence. Not my favorite spot.

Skukuza was also where we did the first of our guided drives. We chose to do a nighttime drive with a guide since guests aren’t allowed outside the camps at night except on the guided drives. Our driver knew where a pride of lions was resting, so we started the drive by heading out to see them. After that, it was just trying to spot the glint of eyes in the bush as our spotlights swept the bush. We saw some mongooses, bush babies, buffalo, and hippos, plus our driver managed to spot not one, but two separate chameleons in branches along the road!

Night 3 – Lower Sabie Rest Camp

Our next rest camp destination was the Lower Sabie Rest Camp, located southeast of Skukuza. We left Skukuza earlier than we had left Malelane in hopes of seeing something unique, but while we enjoyed the calm of the morning, we didn’t really find much until later in the morning when we happened upon a crowd of cars near a bridge.

We rolled down the window to ask what they saw, and it turned out to be a leopard! We have friends who went on safari in Kruger for 10 years straight before seeing their first leopard, so we felt pretty lucky to find this one.

Soon after, we arrived at the Lower Sabie Rest Camp and set up our tent.

As it was still early in the day, we decided to drive south to Crocodile Bridge and see what we could see. It was a lucky decision because while we were there we met someone who had just spotted a lion right on the road a short drive from there. We followed his directions and got some amazing shots of a young male lion walking down the road!

After that, it was back to camp for some sunset shots of the local giraffes, and dinner looking over the Lower Sabie River. Lower Sabie’s campsites felt almost as cramped as Skukuza’s, but the view from the restaurant was amazing. And since we had waited until sunset to get back, it didn’t much matter that it was cramped because we went straight to bed!

In the morning, we made our coffee, hopped in the car, and set off for Satara.

Night 4 – Satara Rest Camp

While you can spot lions and leopards throughout the park, Satara is the rest camp best known for being in “big cat territory,” so on the drive up we were specifically looking out for new cat sightings. So obviously, this was the section of our trip where we finally spotted the Giant Ground Hornbill.

Ironically, they were not on the ground, but instead were feasting on the fruit in one of the trees. We took pictures the best pictures we could, wrote up the GPS coordinates for reporting, and continued on.

Satara is the third-largest rest camp in Kruger, but the since the campsites are located along the outer perimeter, we were able to get a site where we could see the wildlife outside the fence! After setting up, we decided we were tired of snacking on biltong in the car for lunch and went to check out their steakhouse. We ended up splitting a bush meat platter filled with cuts of meat from some of the different grazers you can spot in the park.

While Satara is known as a place for spotting big cats, our family was most impressed with the abundance of elephants in the area. Several times we were able to watch entire herds of elephants crossing the road in front of us, including some absolutely adorable babies!

In the morning, we took our second guided drive of the week. The sunrise drive we were on was the first car out of camp, and almost immediately we spotted lions lounging on the road! We also spotted a couple of hyenas, elephants, buffalos, and tons of grazers, but those lions were definitely the highlight of the drive.

Satara was as far north as we went during our time in the park, though it is only about midway up. So after we finished the guided drive, we packed up and began our trip back toward the gates.

Night 5 – Skukuza Rest Camp

Our final night was spent back in Skukuza, in almost the exact same camping spot as before. But we still had a full day of exploring to do before nightfall, and we decided to seek out the elusive cheetah. We checked out the sighting boards and noticed that a cheetah had been spotted not far from Skukuza at the Albasini ruins.

We never did find that cheetah, but since we were in the area, we did check out the ruins!

Apparently, there was once a trading post there that profited off of trade routes through the area that would become Kruger National Park, and the ruins are the remains of that post’s foundations. But what caught my eye was the map next to the ruins, laying out all the historical sites and markers in the park! You can see that map on Kruger’s website.

Even before it was a national park, the area had a rich history, and there are a ton of interesting historical markers and educational sites to check out if you’re inclined. Apart from the Albasini ruins, we also checked out the Selati Rail Car that has been transformed into a restaurant in Skukuza, the Stevenson-Hamilton Library and Museum, and the southernmost Baobab tree.

Other historical places that caught my eye but that we didn’t visit include San Bushman rock paintings, the Thulamela Iron Age site, and the statue of Jock of the Bushveld!

After checking out the ruins, we headed back to Skukuza for our last night in the park, and in the morning we headed back south to Malelane gate.

My family loves reading stories that are set in the locations we visit, and it turns out the story of Jock of the Bushveld is available for free on Kindle.

Get it on Amazon

Making a Self-Drive Safari into an Experiential Learning Event

Part of the joy of worldschooling with your kids is getting to teach them about the world through utterly engaging experiences like an African Safari. Experiential learning works because kids get to see things firsthand, which helps cement concepts in place.

But while just taking a field trip with your kids already does a great job of teaching them on its own, putting in a little extra effort can really help to drive home important concepts that they may not get through observation alone.

Here are some suggestions!

Animal Studies

Safaris lend themselves incredibly well to doing animal studies since the animals are right there! Studying different animals can help kids to learn about the amazing amount of biodiversity that exists on earth, and about how animal adaptations help them to thrive in their home environments.

This doesn’t have to look like a book report or a research paper, either. (Though it can!) I like to look up facts about animals while we’re watching them and share them with my kids. Like, did you know that elephants communicate with each other using vocalizations that are so low-pitched that humans can’t hear them all? That lion roars can be heard up to 5 miles away? Or that a hippo’s main food is grass?

Animal studies are great because they’re so easy and interesting!

Just a note here. I love having a cell phone mount that attaches to binoculars or a spotting scope. Some of the animals were far enough back in the bush that our kids had a hard time seeing them, and they probably wouldn’t have except that my phone worked as a viewer for the binoculars so they could see exactly where they were. After that, they could spot them with their own eyes.

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09/12/2024 02:37 pm GMT

These are the binoculars I used and they did a great job helping the kids spot animals. The phone mount worked great with my Pixel 4a.

Teaching about conservation

Conservation is an increasingly important concept in today’s world, especially if we want these animals to continue thriving in the wild. Safaris, and other nature-centric outings, are perfect field trips for helping kids to fall in love with nature and encouraging them to care for their world.

With smaller kids, this can definitely just be talking about how we need to pick up our trash and leave places better than when we found them, but as kids get older it’s important to talk about the larger impacts humans have on the environment and discuss ways of mitigating that.

Doing Citizen Science

Finding and reporting our sightings of the Giant Ground Hornbills was one of my personal highlights of the trip, and hearing my kids tell complete strangers about the process was another.

This wasn’t a planned part of our trip, but I’m so glad we had the opportunity to take part in researching these amazing birds!

Posters for older citizen science opportunities monitoring cheetahs and wild dogs were still hanging at some of the rest camps, so it appears that these opportunities are a semi-regular sort of thing, too.

Go for Cross-Discipline Learning

While animals and the environment are obviously the big winners when considering learning opportunities during a safari, Kruger actually has some other pretty interesting things going for it as well.

Historical markers throughout the park make great leaping-off points for learning about the region’s history. While the museum at Skukuza is small, it has some great information about the indigenous peoples who lived there before Kruger became a park. And there’s a neat display showing off the area’s geology at the Berg-en-dal rest camp as well.

Any of these and more can become great starting points for lessons for inquisitive kids!

The key is to explore as much as possible, and when something sparks your kids’ interest, dive into it with them!