Addo Elephant National Park – Spekboom and Matyholweni

Addo Elephant National Park is the third biggest national animal reserve in South Africa. It hosts the big 7 (lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, African buffalo, great white shark and southern right whale). There are places to stay in the park, where you are locked into camps at about 6pm every night.

We stayed at two – Spekboom Tented Camp and Matyholweni Rest Camp.

Spekboom Tented Camp was my favourite of the two. It is a very basic tent with no electricity and no facilities. There are communal showers, toilets and washing up facilities close by. The best part is that you are right next to a watering hole so you can look at animals any time you want. There is no wifi but there is phone signal.

This is the view from the watering hole. The camp is fenced in so this is the view from the little viewing ports.

These are some of the things we saw on our drives. We did self-drive, although you can book with guides.

Babies play-fighting

The second camp we stayed at was Matyholweni Rest Camp. This one has facilities but no phone reception of any kind (rather unfortunate for the Germans checking in behind us who wanted to work). It is rather more luxurious than Spekboom. We did have a mild monkey problem though.

If you enlarge this map, you can see that we entered to the north of the park (where there is reception, a lovely shop and a restaurant. Spekboom is more to the north side of the camp. We then did all the loops on the way south to Matyholweni, where we exited the park and drove 30km to the city where I grew up.