Kruger Through a Mom’s Eyes — Trip 5: The Winter Trip

July 2024 | Malelane → Berg-en-Dal | Next Gen Ford Ranger

We weren’t supposed to be back so soon.

Kruger has a rhythm for us — a once-a-year pilgrimage that we plan months in advance, that gets its own spreadsheet and its own packing list and its own quiet anticipation that builds for weeks before we leave.

July 2024 broke that rhythm.

We went back anyway.

And winter Kruger turned out to be something else entirely.

The South, For the First Time

We entered through Malelane gate for the first time — our first proper trip into the south of the park — and the bush immediately felt different.

Winter does that.

The summer green is gone. The grass is dry and low and golden. The trees have thinned out. The landscape opens up in a way that summer Kruger never does, and suddenly you can see further, deeper into the bush, into spaces that would be hidden behind vegetation in November.

It’s a different kind of beautiful.

Starker. More exposed. The kind of landscape that makes the animals easier to find and somehow makes the park feel even more ancient than it usually does.

Berg-en-Dal camp sits in the south, tucked into a valley with a dam and a perimeter fence trail that winds through rocky terrain unlike anything in the north. It’s a bigger camp — busy, but big enough to absorb the people without feeling crowded. Not as intense as Skukuza. More relaxed. The kind of camp where you can find a quiet corner even in peak season.

We liked it immediately.

Rhinos, Everywhere

Rhinos were everywhere.

I want to be clear about what I mean by everywhere, because Trip 1’s rhino sighting — one rhino, at a waterhole, mud-caked, with an oxpecker on its back, the kids going completely silent — was a singular, weighted moment that we’d carried with us for two years.

This was not that.

This was rhinos on the road. Rhinos at waterholes. Rhinos in the bush beside the car, close enough that you could hear them breathing. Multiple sightings a day, every day, until the kids were calling them out the window with the same casual energy they’d use to spot a petrol station on the N1.

It didn’t make them less extraordinary.

It just made them familiar in a way that felt like a gift.

After years of reading about declining numbers, of treating every sighting like something fragile and possibly unrepeatable — to be in a part of the park where rhinos were simply there, going about their lives, was something I hadn’t expected to feel the way it did.

The Waterhole and the Dagga Boys

We found the waterhole on the first morning and never really left it.

Two old buffalo bulls had claimed it as their own.

Not a herd — just two. Old males, past their prime, the kind that have been pushed out of the breeding herds and now live out their days on their own terms. Dagga boys, they’re called. Mud-caked, scarred, completely unbothered by anything the world had to offer.

They were there every morning. Every evening. Anchoring the waterhole like they’d been there since the park was founded and intended to remain until it closed.

And because they were there, everything else came too.

Baboons, mostly — troops of them, moving through with the chaotic, hierarchical energy that baboons always carry. Watching baboon social dynamics at a waterhole is its own kind of entertainment. The politics. The squabbles. The elaborate performances of dominance that somehow always end with someone getting chased and everyone pretending it didn’t happen.

The kids were fascinated.

We came back every single day.

The Tracking Collar

The tracking collar stopped us mid-drive.

A lioness, moving through the bush beside the road, with a collar around her neck that immediately changed how you looked at her. She was healthy — strong, well-fed, moving with purpose — but the collar made her feel simultaneously wild and monitored. Part of a dataset. Part of an ongoing conversation between scientists and a park trying to understand and protect what it has.

It’s a strange feeling, watching a wild lion and knowing that somewhere, someone is watching the same data point on a screen.

She didn’t seem to mind.

The Hyena Den

The hyena den was right next to the road.

We almost drove past it — just a hole in the ground, easy to miss — but something made us slow down, and then we saw them.

Pups. The youngest we’d ever seen. Barely old enough to be at the entrance of the den, small enough that the whole world still looked enormous and slightly alarming to them.

They peered out at the car with the wide-eyed uncertainty of animals who haven’t yet decided whether to be curious or afraid.

We sat there very quietly for a long time.

Lions, Hyenas and Two Very Still Children

One evening at the Berg-en-Dal restaurant, the kids sat down to dinner and found a wildlife documentary playing on the screen.

Lions and hyenas. A territorial dispute over a kill — the kind of raw, unglamorous, completely honest nature that David Attenborough has spent a career making people comfortable watching.

The kids didn’t move for the entire meal.

No phones. No requests for dessert before they’d finished their mains. No negotiations about vegetables.

Just two children watching the bush explain itself on a screen while the actual bush sat right outside the restaurant windows in the dark.

Sheldon and I looked at each other over their heads.

This is working, that look said. Whatever we’re doing, it’s working.

The Monkeys

The monkeys at the restaurant deserve their own mention.

Berg-en-Dal’s vervet monkeys have developed what can only be described as a sophisticated intimidation strategy. They don’t steal — not exactly. They sit very close. They make eye contact. They radiate a specific energy that says I have done this before and I will do it again and there is nothing you can do about it.

Multiple people lost food during our stay.

We watched it happen with the detached fascination of people who had been warned and had therefore held their plates very firmly.

The monkeys were completely unashamed.

Sheldon and the Elephant

The elephant found Sheldon late in the afternoon.

We’d been debating whether to go for another drive — the kind of debate that happens on day three of a Kruger trip when you’re tired and the camp is comfortable and the idea of another hour in the car feels like effort.

Sheldon went to the fence instead.

Just him. Late afternoon light. The camp quiet around him.

And the elephant came.

Not charging. Not alarmed. Just walking, slowly, along the fence line, and then stopping. Right there. Close enough to touch if the fence hadn’t been between them. Close enough that Sheldon could see the texture of its skin, the slow movement of its breathing, the particular ancient calm that elephants carry when they’re not threatened and not threatening.

They stood there together for a while.

The elephant didn’t move on. Sheldon didn’t move away.

I found out about it afterwards, when he came back to the chalet quieter than usual.

“An elephant came to the fence,” he said.

That was all.

Some moments don’t need more words than that.

We left earlier than planned.

The business needed us back. Real life, doing what real life does — arriving uninvited, making its demands, pulling you out of the bush before you’re ready.

We packed the Ranger and drove south through the Malelane gate and back into the world.

But winter Kruger had given us something we hadn’t expected.

Rhinos everywhere, casual and magnificent. Two old dagga boys who owned a waterhole and didn’t care who knew it. The youngest hyena pups we’d ever seen. A lioness wearing a collar that connected her to a world beyond the fence. Monkeys with absolutely no shame. A documentary that held two children completely still through an entire meal.

And Sheldon, standing at a fence in the late afternoon light, while an elephant decided he was worth stopping for.

Some trips you go back sooner than planned.

This was one of those trips.

This is Part 5 of the Kruger Through a Mom’s Eyes series. Part 6 — the final trip — coming soon.

Danyel Kitching is the co-founder of Alpha Accessories, a 4x4 fitment centre in Centurion. The snack crates remain non-negotiable. The monkeys remain undefeated.