Kruger & Big Five Reserves

Kruger runs 360 kilometres from the Crocodile River to the Limpopo and about 65 kilometres across at its widest: roughly 19,485 square kilometres of Lowveld between the Drakensberg escarpment and the Lebombo mountains on the Mozambican border. It holds 147 mammal species, 507 birds and 336 trees, and few protected areas carry the Big Five at these densities across this much ground.

In 1898 the government of the South African Republic, under President Paul Kruger, proclaimed the Sabi Game Reserve between the Sabie and Crocodile rivers to halt the hunting that had emptied the Lowveld. James Stevenson-Hamilton became first warden in 1902 and stayed forty-four years, evicting hunters and cattle with enough zeal that local people named him Skukuza, he who sweeps clean — the name now carried by the park headquarters and its airport. The National Parks Act of 1926 merged the Sabi and Shingwedzi reserves into Kruger National Park, and motor cars were admitted from 1927. In 2002 it joined the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park.

What made Kruger a luxury destination happened on its western edge, where private reserves had grown up alongside the park from the 1920s, fenced off from it for decades. Those fences came down: the Sabi Sand and Timbavati in 1993, the Klaserie, Olifants and Balule in the late 1990s, Thornybush in 2017. The result is the open system now called the Greater Kruger, where game moves freely between state and private land but the rules governing vehicles change sharply at an invisible line.

Sabi Sand — where a first safari should sleep

The Sabi Sand is the benchmark: constituted in 1934, renamed in 1948, some 65,000 hectares of nineteen original farms along the Sabie and Sand rivers. Decades of low-pressure vehicle contact have produced leopards that ignore a Land Cruiser entirely, and this is the most reliable leopard photography on the continent. Londolozi, founded as Sparta farm in 1926 and turned to photographic safari by the Varty family in 1971, was the first game reserve in the world admitted to Relais and Châteaux, in 1993. MalaMala, founded in 1927 by Sir Abe Bailey, is the oldest private reserve in the country at 13,500 hectares, with 19 kilometres of river frontage and no other lodges on its traverse. Singita, Lion Sands, Sabi Sabi and Dulini fill out the field.

Timbavati and the Klaserie — space, and fewer vehicles

The Timbavati, formed by a group of landowners in 1956, runs to about 534 square kilometres across fifty contiguous properties with roughly a dozen lodges. It is known for the white lions first recorded here in the mid-1970s — a recessive colour morph, not a separate species, and a matter of luck rather than itinerary. The adjoining Klaserie is larger again at 60,000 hectares and quieter still. Both trade some leopard reliability for space and for rates well below the Sabi Sand: position them for second safaris and for photographers. Thornybush, 14,000-odd hectares west, dropped its fence in 2017; Royal Malewane is the address there.

Manyeleti and the lesser-known reserves — value without compromise

Manyeleti sits between the Sabi Sand and the Timbavati, unfenced from Kruger, at 22,750 hectares. Five hunting farms bought by the apartheid state Department of Bantu Affairs opened in 1967 as the one reserve black South Africans were permitted to visit; the name is Xitsonga for place of stars. Bed density is very low and rates the most reasonable in the Greater Kruger for comparable game, as at neighbouring Balule and Olifants.

Kruger National Park proper — and the concessions inside it

The public park has nine entry gates and SANParks rest camps from Skukuza and Lower Sabie to Punda Maria in the north. Southern and central Kruger hold the highest game densities and, in season, the traffic to match.

The exception is the private concessions — exclusive-use areas leased inside the park, where the operator traverses land no one else may enter and may drive off-road, drive at night and walk. The Singita concession of 15,000 hectares in the south-east, awarded in 2001 and holding Lebombo and Sweni above the N’wanetsi River, is the most rarefied address in Kruger. Lukimbi holds 15,000 hectares and Imbali 10,000.

The far north — Pafuri and the Makuleke Concession

Where the Luvuvhu meets the Limpopo at Crooks Corner, on the three-way border with Zimbabwe and Mozambique, Kruger becomes a different country: fever tree forests, baobabs and sandstone gorges in place of the flat mopane of the south. The Makuleke Concession is 240 square kilometres, one per cent of the park, and holds close to three-quarters of its biodiversity with more than 250 bird species in a season. The land belongs to the Makuleke people, forcibly removed in 1969 and granted restitution in 1998, who now lease it for tourism; Pafuri Camp and The Outpost are the addresses. A second or third stop, never a first safari.

The Panorama Route — a day, not a base

West of the park the Drakensberg escarpment drops to the Lowveld, and the road along its lip is the Panorama Route. The Blyde River Canyon runs 26 kilometres and falls as much as 800 metres; the set pieces are the Three Rondavels, God’s Window and Bourke’s Luck Potholes, with the 1870s gold-rush village of Pilgrim’s Rest between Sabie and Graskop.