Kruger January 2013

[spindrift1]

^ Mine too!

[tod2]

Nycgirl - Would it be possible for you to give us the camps you stayed at/booked and then diverted to?
Thanks!

[nycboy]

Pretoriuskop (booked day before we arrived, I drove fast)
Sable Hide
Shipandani Hide
Lower Sabie
Lower Sabie
Satara
Satara
Tamboti (diverted to Letaba)

[tod2]

Thanks so much! Yesterday I booked 16 days in Kruger during October. From the 10th to 31st we qualify for a 40% discount on selected accommodation. Luckily for us this includes Croc Bridge camp - our point of entry via Swaziland, the satellite camp of Malelane, Pretoriouskop, Letaba, Punda Maria, Mopani, and Orpen. The more busy camps like Lower Sabie, Satara and Skukuza do not offer this discount but we are happy with any of the others because it means we can stay twice as long ;D

[nycgirl]

Nice! Do you qualify for the discount because of the length of your stay or because of the time of travel?

[tod2]

No sweetheart....just because we're so old! All old age pensioners get several months in which they can get the discount. September and October are two of the months but I'm not sure of the others.
Kruger has promotions and discounts to anyone at certain times - probably when it's not school holidays.
Also, a lot of the accommodation is block-booked by Safari companies who then sell it on to their clients as a package deal. On a number of occasions we have had a couple in the hut next to ours who were on a private tour with a guide who is the driver. Don't know if I'd go for that - especially if you don't like each other and are stuck together until the end.

Pension age in Kruger is 60 regardless if you're a man or woman,
but in real life a man only gets a pension at 65.

[tod2]

I hope you are still checking Nycgirl, on more info on your thread about Kruger!
I say this because the most uncanny thing happened the other day.
Sitting at the hairdressers I pulled out a magazine - quite old actually - and after a few pages found an article on a young school boy who had developed something quite unique.

On a trip to Kruger National Park he irritated his parents so much by making them stop and ask other motorists passing by, if they had seen any animals, he devised and created an application for a cellphone /computer, which allows one to access all other fellow animals 'hunters' in the park as to where and when precisely a lion, cheetah, elephant or leopard etc etc., has been sighted. This makes it easier for visitors who are close by the area to quickly arrive at the sight and take photos.

As we have an impending trip to Kruger in October, I am hoping to see how accurately this is going to work!

[Deleted]

That sounds like both good and bad news to me. On the one hand, you have a greater chance of seeing what you want to see, but on the other hand it means that lots of people could converge on the place at the same time.

When I took my parents on a safari in Kenya, we sometimes ended up with 6 or 8 vans surrounding some sleepy lions, because even though there was no app at the time, it was easy for the drivers to spot the other vans and immediately go to whatever they had found.

As much as I would like to see "all" of the animals, I myself believe that it might be more special to find them unexpectly rather than just heading to the correct foretold spot. Naturally, regular visitors do not need this special feeling and I fully understand just getting on with business and taking your spectacular photos as efficiently as possible.

(Just thinking about this though, I am struck with the odd idea of the monuments of Paris moving about at random and having to be found like animals. In a case like that, I would certainly understand people wanting special information on exactly where to find the monuments!)

[nycboy]

It's funny you should mention that, the first leopard we saw a guy pulled up and we overheard their conversation, it was the guy who invented, I believe he said, latestsightings.com. He was being driven around and he was using his cell (mobile to post about the sighting. The driver was having a friendly chat about how the inventor paid for his house with the proceeds from the site.

[tod2]

Mmmmm.....could be - the school boy from the magazine I was reading must have left school by now.
Gawd, if this has paid for his house from the proceeds, -----why aren't we doing the same thing!!
C'mon Kerouac, invent some awesome thing we tourists are just thirsty for in Paris....... ;D

I have to point out that cellphone reception in Kruger is at best ....very poor. The areas for reception are marked on the map but going to the top of a hill is better than down in a valley!
Did you find this Nycboy?

[nycboy]

The few times I looked it wasn't very good, even at the camps.

[nycboy]

We thought the inventor we saw couldn't be more than 30. I didn't get a name so maybe it's a different guy.

[nycgirl]

That's a funny coincidence if we did indeed see the same guy you read about in the article, Tod.

I agree that the site does take away the fun of discovering the animals on your own and would lead to stupendous crowds at a sighting. However, I can certainly understand why someone having a slow day would want to take advantage of it. I didn't get to see cheetahs in the wild and probably would have followed the site if it lead me to them.

Another thing I'd be concerned about is people posting rhino sightings. I noticed at the sightings board in the camps, the magnets representing the rhinos were removed and a message was posted saying that rhino sightings will not be reported for their safety. However, at one board the magnets were still there and they were placed on the map, so I swiped them.

[tod2]

Good for you Ncygirl!! More fun is to put them back in various other places.....but then just maybe there would be a rhino there too!
I have seen children removing the drawing-pins of various animals and poking them back in other places on the map whilst their uninterested parents peruse the various tourist trappings.......