Before you ask - yes, we saw the ‘Big 5’. We even have the pictures to prove it. Elephants and buffalo can be seen almost everywhere in the park and you are pretty much guaranteed to see them up close and personal.
This elephant calf seemed a bit curious and playful, approaching our car with no fear at all. Since the mother was feeding only a couple of meters away this caused the adrenaline to start pumping, but she really couldn’t care less.
Rhino is a bit trickier to find and you are far from guaranteed to see one. In our case, however, we saw nine white rhino during our one week in Kruger; a couple of them were even kind enough to casually stroll along the main road, seemingly posing for the camera.
Lions are also tricky to spot since they are more active after the sun sets. During the day you are unlikely to see lions doing anything more than relaxing (a lion will happily spend 20 hours a day sleeping). Spotting a lion sleeping in the high, dry grass is very difficult since they blend in perfectly with their fur having pretty much the same colour as the grass (or maybe it is the grass that is lion-coloured).
Leopards - now, there’s the real challenge. There’s only about a thousand of them left in Kruger National Park (and the park is the size of Israel) and they are extremely shy animals. You should really consider yourself lucky if you see one because out of the Big 5 leopards are, by far, the rarest to see. We consider ourselves very lucky because we had an excellent sighting of a female leopard in a tree right next to the road and for quite a while we were the only ones at this sighting! A couple of old people came by after a while, praising our spotting abilities since they couldn’t see the leopard ten meters away until we pointed at it.
The best sightings we had this week might have been the hyenas. On three separate occasions we saw hyena cubs, running around chasing each other or just investigating our vehicle. Sometimes we couldn’t even focus the cameras on them since they were too close! We mostly came across them early in the mornings and when we did our day was off to a good start. At one of the camps there are hyenas patrolling the camp fence in hope of finding leftovers from someone’s campfire dinner. This definitely added to the atmosphere as we saw it passing by as a dark shadow many times at night and could hear the calls of other hyenas all through the night. You never sleep as well as when there is wildlife calling… unless the wildlife happens to be francolins of course, annoying and loud birds!
Mammals are what people in general find the most interesting so we thought that we should post pictures of a few of the less common or for that matter, less known mammals we came across during our week in KNP.We saw many waterbuck, mainly close to the rivers and drainage lines. Because they produce a secretion from special glands in their skin that impregnate their fur so they have a bit of an odour to them. It is said that you can smell them some 500 meters away.
Bushbuck - nice looking animals - they have something of a Bambi touch don’t you think? We took a lot of photos of this specimen since we are used to them being very shy and running away if you even think about a camera.
Since reedbucks don’t occur in Makalali, we were a bit confused when seeing them from a distance and couldn’t decide what they were… They are similar to bushbuck (colouration, horns and habitat differs though) but less common. These relaxed Reedbucks were feeding down in a drainage line, preferring habitats close to water sources.
Kudu - this is the second largest antelope (after Eland) and Anja´s favourite antelope and quite a photogenic species. This is a small female, males are very large (250 kg) with huge, spiralled horns. They taste very good too and we had an excellent kudu steak for dinner at one of the camps!
Female Chackma baboon, and her little baby. They really are freakishly similar to humans when they are small. This is an animal that many people just drive past although they actually are among the most interesting to watch. 
/A & J
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