We slept in this morning, planning on going to Kruger a little later. After getting showered and changed we left house around 9am and drove to the same entrance gate, as it has more dirt roads and it less busy than the one gate closer to us and Paul Kruger gate which is the busiest in the
park. Hopefully that means more animals, and as we got so lucky on our first day it was worth a shot! The weather was really beautiful today, finally it wasn't raining and we could see a lot further off the road. We ended up getting a little lost around the circle dirt roads by the gate as we had the first day because the map I had wasn't very detailed. Thankfully 3G and the iPhone came to the rescue and we eventually found the road we wanted. There were loads and loads of wildebeest, three separate heards of an average of 50 to a heard, it was a brilliant sight.
I spotted a few elephants tucked away on our left soon afterwards, and a car that had been closely tailing us drove straight past while we parked and stopped the car. The reward for our patience was watching the heard of 20 elephant cross the road and seeing the two tiny baby elephants too! There was a short moment where I was ready to start the car and reverse as I didn't know if we had upset one of the mums, but thankfully they kept on walking. We ended up having to wait for 5 minutes behind a car on the bridge to stare at two uninterested birds but it was worth it when we took another road than they did once we crossed and saw a huge male elephant straight afterwards! Dan noticed that he had secretions coming out between his eyes and ears which we were warned about when we entered the park. He is called a musth elephant and they can be very aggressive, so you are warned to keep a very safe distance and not stick around for too long. We had reversed from the road we were on to watch him cross the bridge road, but where we had parked was obviously too close for comfort for him as he began charging us! Dan quickly high tailed us out of there!!! It's quite scary to be charged by an animal who could literally crush our car if we gave him the cance.
We didnt see any large game from then on, just a few buck. What we were able to do was help a chameleon and antortoise cross the road. They really dont move very fast at all, and even though the speed limits in the park are 40kms per hour on the dirt roads and 50kms per hour on the tar road, some people wouldnt see them and could squish them! After our animal rescue mission we headed straight back to the house through Paul Kruger gate. We had showers and got changed to go out to dinner, and watched the finale of junior masterchef before we left. Dinner was at a very highly recommended place on trip advisor, and we were not disappointed!
The restaurant was called Pioneers Butcher and Grill, where we had large glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, and amazing amazing steak! I had the 300g rump, basted in the Pioneers special glaze that was amazing and a side salad that turned into chips as the waiter clearly wasn't listening to me. They were both divine! Dan had Rump Mozambique, a steak topped with anchovies, peri peri chicken livers and a fried egg. He asked for the vegetable side and got green beans and an amazing sweet potato mash that I had quite a lot of :D We also shared a creme brule for dessert and enjoyed our meal so much that we asked our waiter, Bernard, to ask the chef to come over so we could say thank you. She had obviously not been told why we were calling her over and looked a little apprehensive as though we were going to complain!! She was really pleased when we thanked her profusely for the delicious meal, and told her we would be back for dinner again tomorrow because it was so good! We went to sleep full and very content :)
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