The world knows my country for Cape Town, its vineyards and its coastline, yet the true soul of South Africa lives out in the bushveld. As the legendary Kruger National Park marks a century since it became a national park, I explain why it still draws the world to the land of the Big Five.
When the world pictures my country, it usually imagines the flat top of Table Mountain, the rolling vineyards of the Cape or the endless beaches of our coastline. Yet for many of us who grew up here, the truest soul of South Africa is not found in the city at all. It lives out in the vast, golden bushveld of the north, where the wild still writes the rules.
A century of a national treasure
This year carries a very special weight for anyone who loves our natural heritage, because the mighty Kruger National Park is marking one hundred years since it was formally proclaimed a national park. The national parks authority known as SANParks has rightly hailed this centenary as one of the great milestones in the long story of African conservation.
The origins of the park stretch back even further, to the late nineteenth century, when a stretch of lowveld was first set aside as a protected game reserve. It was only in 1926 that these lands were merged and elevated into a full national park, taking the name of the old statesman Paul Kruger, who had championed the idea of protecting the wildlife.
The land of the Big Five
What makes Kruger so utterly magnetic for visitors from every corner of the planet is of course its extraordinary cast of animals. This is the celebrated home of the Big Five, that famous roll call of the lion, the leopard, the rhinoceros, the elephant and the buffalo, all of which roam freely across a landscape that feels genuinely untouched by time.
The sheer scale of the place is difficult to put into words for someone who has never been there. Spreading across nearly two million hectares, the park shelters an estimated 147 different mammal species and well over 500 kinds of birds, boasting one of the densest concentrations of the Big Five to be found anywhere in the whole of Southern Africa.
The rhythm of the game drive
Life inside the park follows the ancient rhythm of the sun rather than the ticking of any clock, and the safari experience bends to that same beat. The finest sightings tend to come in the soft light of dawn and again at dusk, when the heat relents and the predators and their prey alike stir into cautious, watchful movement across the plains.
One of the quiet glories of Kruger is just how welcoming it is to ordinary travellers and local families, not only to the wealthy few. You can hire a simple car and drive its excellent network of roads entirely on your own, or you can climb aboard an open guided vehicle and let an expert ranger read the secret signs of the bush for you.
More than a photo safari
It would be a mistake, however, to imagine the park as merely a giant open-air studio for tourist photographs. Behind the beautiful sightings lies a deadly serious and often heartbreaking struggle to protect these animals, above all the rhinoceros, whose survival is threatened every single night by the relentless and well-armed criminals of the poaching trade.
The park is also a genuine engine for our wider economy, one that reaches far beyond its own fences and gates. The lodges, the guides, the restaurants and the countless small businesses that surround the reserve provide precious jobs and dignity to thousands of people in the rural communities that call this remote corner of the country their home.
When to go and what to expect
For those dreaming of their own journey into the wild, the timing of a visit really does matter a great deal. The dry winter months around July and August tend to be the busiest, partly because of our local school holidays, yet they also offer the clearest wildlife viewing as thirsty animals gather in the open around the shrinking rivers and waterholes.
The wonderful secret is that the park is so immense that solitude is always within reach for the patient traveller. Turn off the main tourist arteries and onto the quieter gravel roads, and you can quickly find yourself entirely alone with the landscape, sharing the silence only with a browsing giraffe or a distant, dust-raising herd.
A living piece of who we are
In the end, Kruger is so much more than a simple tourist attraction to be ticked off a list and forgotten. It is a living, breathing piece of our national identity, a source of enormous pride that sits comfortably alongside our music, our cities and our famous wines as a defining symbol of everything that this complicated and beautiful country has to offer the world.
So if you ever find yourself planning a trip to the southern tip of Africa, please do not stop at the cities and the coast alone. Give yourself a few days out in the ancient bushveld, let the dawn chorus wake you inside the fence, and allow a hundred year old wilderness to remind you what our planet once looked like everywhere.
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