Animals enjoying the COVID-19 calm in the Kruger National Park

I love South Africa’s Kruger National Park. I have only been there twice – for a week each time – but it remains one of the best experiences of my life. The park is the largest game reserve in Africa – just a little bit smaller than Belgium – and is home to millions of animals living in their natural habitat. As you enter the park, you leave civilisation behind and sleep in compounds at night. They lock you in and you can hear the lion just outside the fence. We have always driven ourselves but you can go on organised drives as well.

Just of the ‘Big Five,’ the Kruger Park (350km long and 60km wide) has approximately 1,600 lion, 17,000 elephant, 2,700 buffalo, 1,000 leopards and more than 5,000 rhino (black and white).

Animals don’t ‘see’ cars in the same way as they would see pedestrians, so they go about their day as usual in the park, walking across the roads in front of cars as though they were not there.

But now, during the COVID-19 lockdown, the animals have taken back the roads – and the golf course! And rhino poaching has decreased too which is brilliant.

These photos come from the Kruger Park Twitter account, which is well-worth a follow. There are webcams and selfie-cams all over the park.