I got through customs without incident last night, ended up having to pay off an airport cop for helping me find transportation to the hotel, got a few hours of sleep, then returned to the airport this morning and flew to Nelspruit. From there I got a rental car and commenced driving on the left side of the road, which shockingly didn’t lead to any casualties, although I did hit the windshield wiper instead of the turn signal on about a dozen different occasions. By mid-afternoon I made it to Kruger National Park.<\/p>\n
The experience in Kruger National Park is completely<\/i> different from Tanzania or Kenya – in those countries I felt constant excitement as the vehicle barrelled over rough roads and a mind-boggling number of animals appeared all around us. In Kruger the feeling (so far) is one of exceptional calm – there aren’t a ton of other vehicles here, I’m the only one in the car, the roads are in excellent condition, the vegetation is thicker so the landscape feels smaller, and while there are a lot of animals, it’s not the overwhelming hordes like it was in the Serengeti. In addition, the animals here seem to be even less afraid of people then they were further North; I drove the car within feet of impala that just looked at me placidly through the window. One highlight of the day was sitting in the parked car, engine off, watching a bull elephant eating trees, and the only sound was the elephant chewing – no other cars, no other noises, just me and the elephant. Pretty magical.<\/p>\n
I didn’t see any new animals today – giraffe, elephants, impala, hippos, crocodiles, bushbuck, baboons, and a variety of birds made up the species list for the day. I took less than a dozen photos, and none of them were exciting enough to post, so this will sadly be the first journal entry in a while without pictures. Tomorrow I’ll have a full twelve hours to drive around the park, so hopefully either some new species or some great photo opportunities will provide illustrations for the next entry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got through customs without incident last night, ended up having to pay off an airport cop for helping me find transportation to the hotel, got a few hours of sleep, then returned to the airport this morning and flew to Nelspruit. From there I got a rental car and commenced driving on the left … Continue reading “Stay to the Left”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,21],"class_list":["post-7584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-2014-world-tour","tag-south-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7584"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8166,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7584\/revisions\/8166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}