Today we decided to have another go at getting into Kruger very early, again waking up at 5:00. When we woke up the weather was just as crap as the day before but this time we had a plan to get ourselves the wild card and make the day cheap anyway. Because the guards at the Phabeni gate had requested to see my residents permit the day before, and these permits take a while to be issued, we thought we would use these facts to our advantage. This time we brought along our marriage certificate and only Jenny's SA ID book, and went to a gate 2kms further away called Numbi. When the guards asked to see my permit we explained that we had just gotten married and my "Botswana" passport was away getting the residency permit approved by the SA government. We figured we might as well tell them I was from Botswana to avoid any questions about why we was driving a Botswana registered car!
Much to my amazement this plan of action worked, and we paid just R560 for a year long wild card! Essentially we can now go into any of over 80 game parks in Southern Africa for free. After our brilliant stroke of luck and my ingenious fast talk, Dan and I finally entered the Kruger National Park! With both our windows wound down it was pretty cold, so I sat in the passenger seat under the blanket we had bought to cover our things in the boot :D
During our 7 hours in the park we were extremely lucky with what game we saw, and how close it all was to the road and our car! Almost every game sighting we had, besides the hippo obviously, literally walked in front of the car! We saw tonnes of impala and springbok, five buffalo lying 3 metres from the car, waterbuck, two elephant heards, zebra, seven giraffe, warthog, hippos, a woodpecker, a tiny buck that looked like Bambi, a tortoise and a rhino!! Even though it was amazing to see all of the different game, the most special was spotting the rhino because they are being poached to the point of extinction.
On our way out on one of their tar road, we passed by a van full of workers dressed in blue and a man dressed in green carrying a rifle! As we saw no signs about who they were or why they were there, we reported them to a traffic cop who was parked at the next intersection. Kruger has a very severe problem with rhino poachers and they rely on visitors to the park reporting anything suspicious so that they can try to catch them. We had set the sat nav to take us home which has almost all of the roads in the park and the fastest way out was to take us through Paul Kruger gate. As the weather was still very miserable, we drove straight back to Waterberry hill for the evening and watched movies and junior masterchef till we went to sleep.
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