Dense, busy, brilliant
Highest game density and highest visitor numbers. Rhino country, leopard along the Sabie, and the park’s biggest camps. Best for first-timers and short trips. Gates: Malelane, Crocodile Bridge, Numbi, Phabeni, Paul Kruger.
South Africa · Established 1926
Everything you need for the wild.
Two million hectares. 147 mammals. 507 birds. Twenty-one camps and a lifetime of roads. This is the practical, honest guide to Kruger — what to see, where to sleep, which roads to drive and what nobody tells you before you go.
Jump straight in.
Twelve doors into the guide. Everything here also lives in the menu above.
Start Here
Nine guides, one park.
Everything is organised the way you actually plan a safari — animals first, then a bed, then the roads that connect them.
01 · Wildlife
Mammals & birds
All 71 mammals and 131 birds with real photographs, quick facts and the stories behind them. Tap anything for the full profile — and tick off what you’ve seen.
Open the guide 02 · SleepCamps & lodges
Every rest camp, bushveld camp, hide and lodge in the park, filtered by type and region, with what each one actually offers.
Find your camp 03 · DoThings to do
Game drives, wilderness trails, bush walks, hides, heritage sites and the activities most visitors never book.
See what’s on 04 · DiscoverStories & secrets
A lost stone city with Chinese porcelain in it. A ranger who killed a lion with a pocketknife. A bootlegger in the Lebombo. Fourteen true stories, and where to go and stand in them.
Read the stories 05 · DriveBest self-drive routes
Twelve roads worth planning your day around — the S100, the Sabie River road and the ones nobody tells you about.
Pick a route 06 · Time itDistances & drive times
A clickable matrix between every camp and gate, with honest in-park driving times. Ninety kilometres is a morning, not an hour.
Check the matrix 07 · NavigateInteractive map & planner
Every camp, gate, hide and picnic site on a live map, with a route plotter, a sightings log and a trip to-do list.
Open the map 08 · ReferencePark maps & downloads
Ten high-resolution reference maps — the official park map, regional road detail, geology, best drives and coverage. Free to download and print.
Get the maps 09 · PreparePlan your visit
Gate times by month, seasons, fees, malaria, what to pack, the rules and the first-timer mistakes worth avoiding.
Get ready
The Kruger Rule
The people who see the most are simply the ones who stopped the longest.
Quick Answers
The questions everyone asks first.
Short, straight answers. The detail lives on the planning page.
When is the best time to visit?
May to September for game viewing. The bush thins, the grass dies back and animals concentrate at permanent water — you simply see more. Cool mornings, warm days, almost no rain and far fewer mosquitoes.
October to April for scenery and birds. Everything is green, the migrant birds arrive, and impala, wildebeest and zebra all drop their young. It is hotter and wetter, and the thick bush hides things.
How many days do I need?
Three nights is the sensible minimum — one to arrive, two to actually look. Five to seven nights lets you split between two camps in different regions, which is the single best upgrade you can make to a Kruger trip. The south and the north are genuinely different parks.
Can I self-drive, or do I need a guide?
Self-driving is what Kruger is built for. A normal sedan handles every tar road and almost every gravel road in the park. But book at least one guided drive — the open vehicles are higher, the guides know where things were seen yesterday, and morning drives leave before the gates open to the rest of us.
Will I see the Big Five?
Over three or four days, most visitors see four of them. Lion, elephant and buffalo are close to routine. Rhino takes some luck and depends on where you are. Leopard is the one that makes or breaks a trip — patience along the Sabie and Timbavati river roads is the best strategy.
Is it safe? What about malaria?
Kruger is a malaria area, with the highest risk in the wet summer months. Speak to a doctor about prophylaxis, use repellent at dusk and dawn, and sleep under the fan or aircon. Beyond that, the park is very safe — provided you stay in your vehicle, obey speed limits and are inside camp before gate closing.
How far ahead should I book?
SANParks opens reservations 11 months in advance, and South African school holidays are booked out almost immediately. River-front units at Lower Sabie, Olifants and Satara go first. For a peak-season trip, book the day the window opens.
One thing to remember
Most people drive too fast and stop too little. The single best technique in Kruger is to find a waterhole or river view, switch the engine off, and wait twenty minutes. The bush comes to you.
Orientation
Three parks in one.
Kruger runs 360 km north to south. Where you stay changes what you see almost as much as when you go.
The South
The Centre
Open plains, big cats
Marula and knobthorn savanna rolling east to the Lebombo hills. The best lion country in the park, and the least obstructed viewing. Satara is the base. Gate: Orpen.
The North
Wild, quiet, different
Mopane woodland, baobabs and fever tree forests. Fewer visitors, enormous elephant herds, and birds you cannot see anywhere else in South Africa. Gates: Phalaborwa, Punda Maria, Pafuri.
If You Only Do Six Things
The Kruger short list.
Compiled from the things regulars come back for, rather than the things brochures lead with.
01
Drive the S100 at dawn
Seventeen kilometres of gravel east of Satara, and the most productive predator road in Kruger. Be on it as the gates open.
02
Sit at Lake Panic hide
Near Skukuza. Kingfishers, herons, hippo and crocodile at eye level. Take coffee and stay two hours.
03
Book one morning drive
Open vehicle, before the gates open, with someone who knows what was seen yesterday. Worth every rand.
04
Eat roosterkoek at Tshokwane
The halfway stop between Skukuza and Satara, and a Kruger institution since long before you were born.
05
Walk with a guide
Three hours on foot rearranges your sense of scale permanently. You will never look at a buffalo the same way.
06
Stand on the Olifants deck
The camp sits on a cliff a hundred metres above the river. Go at sunset and say nothing for a while.
Reservations
Camps open eleven months ahead.
The best river-front units are the first to go, and school holidays sell out within days. When you know your dates, book them.
Guide · Field map
Works With No Signal
Where you actually are.
Drawn from the guide's own data rather than downloaded map tiles, so it opens instantly and works with the phone in flight mode. Your GPS talks to satellites, not to the network — the blip is live even when the signal bars are empty.
Rest camp
Bushveld camp
Entrance gate
Picnic site
Hide
Tar
Gravel
Road data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL
How To Use It
Reading the map in the car.
Drag to move, pinch or scroll to zoom, tap any marker for what it is and how far it is from you.
The blip
The red dot is you, and the faint ring around it is how sure the phone is — a wide ring means it is still settling, usually under heavy canopy. Give it a minute in the open and it tightens to a few metres.
The ◎ button keeps the map centred on you. Drag the map and it releases, so you can look ahead without fighting it; tap it again to snap back.
The gravel loops
Tap Rds to download the real road network once — every tar road, every gravel loop, every side road, with its number and its length. It comes from OpenStreetMap, which is surveyed geometry rather than the straight camp-to-camp lines underneath, so the S100 bends where the S100 actually bends.
It is about a megabyte and it only needs doing once. After that it works with no signal, like everything else here, and it survives app updates.
Reading the roads
Solid lines are tar, dashed lines are gravel. Road numbers repeat along the length of each road rather than sitting once in the middle, so whatever part of a road is on screen is labelled. Zoom in and the total length of that road appears next to its number — useful for working out whether a loop is a twenty-minute detour or an hour.
Battery
Continuous GPS is the single hungriest thing a phone does. On a long drive, leave this page when you are not using it — the fix stops the moment you switch to another part of the guide, and picks up again in a few seconds when you come back.
Guide · Wildlife
Field Guide
Every mammal you might meet.
Seventy-one mammals and a hundred and thirty-one birds, from the aardvark to the fish eagle. Tap anything for the full profile — size, diet, where to find it in Kruger and the facts that make it worth stopping for. Tick off what you’ve seen and the guide remembers — mammals and birds on one list.
Your sightings checklist
Tick species as you see them — it saves on this device, so you can keep going all trip.
0/120
Species seen
The Mammal Guide
Seventy-one species, properly introduced.
Search by name or filter by group. Every card opens a full profile with quick facts and a handful of things you almost certainly didn’t know.
No species match — try another name.
The Big Five
Named by hunters, kept by everyone else.
The term has nothing to do with size. It was coined for the five animals considered most dangerous to hunt on foot — which is exactly why they are the five you want to see from a vehicle.
Lion
Where to look
Open plains around Satara, the S100 and H1-4. Listen at night — a roar carries seven kilometres, and it tells you where to drive at dawn.
Leopard
Where to look
Riverine trees along the Sabie (H4-1) and Timbavati (S39). Scan horizontal branches and look for a hanging tail. Dawn and dusk only.
Elephant
Where to look
Everywhere, but the north around Letaba, Mopani and Shingwedzi holds the biggest bulls and the largest herds.
Buffalo
Where to look
Central plains and every river system. They must drink daily, so water in the dry season is a reliable bet.
Rhino
Where to look
Southern grassland — Berg-en-Dal, Pretoriuskop and Lower Sabie. Please never post rhino sightings with location data.
And the rest
Beyond the five
Ask any guide what they most want to see and they’ll say wild dog, pangolin or aardvark. The Big Five is a starting point, not a scorecard.
Birding
507 species. Here are the hundred and thirty-one.
Kruger is one of Africa’s great birding destinations, and when the mammals go quiet at midday the birds never do. These are the ones you have a real chance of naming from the car — 131 species across 56 families — plus the ones worth driving north for. Search by name, scientific name or family, and order them the way a field guide does — systematically, by order and family — or simply A to Z.
No birds match — try another name.
Where to bird
Lake Panic hide near Skukuza is the best in the park. Sunset Dam at Lower Sabie, Ratelpan on the S39, Sweni near Nwanetsi and Kanniedood near Shingwedzi are all outstanding. In the far north, Pafuri picnic site holds species found nowhere else in South Africa.
Also Watching You
Reptiles worth knowing.
Kruger has 118 reptile species. You will see a handful, and you should know these four.
Nile Crocodile
Up to 5 m
In every permanent river and dam. They can hold their breath for over an hour and go a year between meals.
Rock Monitor
Up to 1.5 m
Africa’s largest lizard, often seen crossing roads. Harmless, but it lashes with the tail if cornered.
Leopard Tortoise
Up to 40 kg
The largest tortoise in South Africa and a common road-crossing. Never move one off the road in the direction it came from.
Black Mamba
Up to 4.5 m
Fast, shy and rarely seen. Its name comes from the ink-black mouth, not the grey-brown body. Keep your distance and it will leave.
At a Sighting
How to behave when it finally happens.
The difference between a good sighting and a ruined one is almost always the people watching it.
Do
- Switch the engine off and let the animals settle. Noise is what moves them on.
- Stay well back and give predators a clear escape line, especially at a kill.
- Let people behind you have a turn — pull forward, then reverse back in.
- Point out the sighting quietly to the next car, then let them find it themselves.
- Move on after ten or fifteen minutes if others are waiting.
Don’t
- Never get out of the vehicle, or lean any part of yourself out of a window.
- Never block the road with your car so nobody else can pass or see.
- Never feed anything, ever. A fed baboon is a dead baboon.
- Never call, whistle or hoot to make an animal look at your camera.
- Never post rhino photos with location tags or GPS data enabled.
Speed kills, literally
50 km/h on tar and 40 km/h on gravel are not suggestions. More animals are killed by tourist vehicles in Kruger each year than by poaching in some sections — and at 50 km/h you drive straight past the leopard you came to see.
Next
Now find the roads where they actually are.
Twelve self-drive routes, chosen for what they consistently produce rather than how they look on a map.
Guide · Where to Sleep
Camps & Lodges
Thirty places to fall asleep to lion.
A train suspended over a river. A hide you sleep inside. A camp lit by paraffin lantern. Kruger’s accommodation is far stranger and far better than “bungalow in a fenced camp” suggests — click any of them below and find out what you’d actually be booking.
Start Here
Pick the region first. The camp second.
The most common Kruger booking mistake is choosing a camp for its swimming pool. What matters is what surrounds it at five o’clock in the morning.
First visit · 3–4 nights
Go south
Lower Sabie or Skukuza. Highest game density, the best road network, and the shortest drive in from Johannesburg.
You came for cats
Go central
Satara. The basalt plains grow sweeter grass, which feeds bigger herds, which feeds more lion than anywhere else in the park.
Been before · 5+ nights
Go north
Shingwedzi or Punda Maria. Half the visitors, twice the elephant, and birds you cannot see anywhere else in South Africa.
Travelling with children
Pools and short loops
Berg-en-Dal or Pretoriuskop — big pools, shady lawns, short drives and a fence walk with a hide.
You want nobody around
Bushveld camps
Biyamiti, Bateleur or Sirheni. No day visitors, no shop, no restaurant. Some have roads only you may drive.
One unforgettable night
Sleep in a hide
Shipandani or Sable. The gates shut behind you and you spend the night at ground level beside a waterhole.
The two-camp rule
With five nights or more, split them between two regions. Two south and three central will show you more of Kruger than five nights anywhere single — and the transfer day between them is a full day of game viewing in its own right.
Every Place to Stay
Click a camp. Get the whole story.
Each one opens with its history, what surrounds it, what you’d actually book, an insider tip and a few things that will surprise you.
Nothing matches — try widening the filters.
The Six Categories
What the labels actually mean.
The difference between a rest camp and a bushveld camp is far larger than the names suggest — and getting it wrong ruins trips.
Amenity Key
Read the icons at a glance.
Every camp card carries these. Two of them are warnings rather than facilities — and they are the two that catch people out.
The two that matter most
No shop or fuel means exactly that — bushveld camps, bush lodges and hides have neither, so you arrive with all your food, drink, ice and firewood, and a full tank. No electricity means paraffin lanterns and no fridge charging overnight. Neither is a problem if you know in advance. Both are miserable if you don’t.
Booking
How to actually get the unit you want.
Kruger accommodation is among the most contested in Africa. A little strategy goes a very long way.
Do
- Book the day the 11-month window opens — especially for South African school holidays.
- Ask for a river-front or fence-line unit by number. Regulars know exactly which ones they are, and so do the reservations staff.
- Check for cancellations obsessively in the six weeks before travel. They happen constantly.
- Look at midweek dates. Sunday to Thursday is dramatically easier than weekends.
- Get a WILD Card if you will spend more than about a week in national parks a year — it wipes out the daily conservation fee entirely.
Don’t
- Don’t assume a bungalow has a kitchen. Many have only a fridge and a braai — read the unit description, not the camp description.
- Don’t book a bushveld camp for a first visit unless you are genuinely happy being self-sufficient.
- Don’t plan a long transfer on arrival day. Gate closing times are enforced and the fine is real.
- Don’t leave activity bookings until you arrive — book the morning drive when you book the bed.
- Don’t rely on late fuel. Camp petrol stations keep limited hours.
Reservations
Found it? Then move quickly.
SANParks opens bookings eleven months ahead, and the river-front units go within hours of the window opening.
Guide · Activities
Things to Do
There is far more here than driving.
Most visitors self-drive and go home. The ones who come back for twenty years book the walks, the night drives and the trails. Armed, experienced guides lead every one of them.
If You Book Nothing Else
The three that change the whole trip.
Book these at the same time you book your accommodation. They sell out, and they are the difference between seeing Kruger and experiencing it.
01
The morning game drive
Departs before the gates open, so you are out while the park is still closed to everybody else. Open vehicle, elevated seats, a guide with a radio and yesterday’s sightings in his head. This is the single best-value thing you can book in Kruger.
02
The guided bush walk
Three or four hours on foot with two armed guides. You will not see many big animals — that is not the point. You will learn to read tracks, notice dung, smell rain coming and understand the scale of a buffalo from ground level.
03
The night drive
After dark, Kruger becomes a different park. Genets, civets, bushbabies, owls, honey badgers and hunting hyaena — animals that simply do not exist during daylight hours as far as visitors are concerned.
How to book
Guided drives and walks are booked through the camp reception, or online with your accommodation on the SANParks site. Wilderness trails open eleven months ahead and fill within days. Show up at reception on arrival to check for cancellations even if you booked nothing.
Everything on Offer
Eighteen ways to spend a day.
Filter by what kind of day you feel like having.
Nothing in that category.
The Rhythm
What a perfect Kruger day actually looks like.
Animals move at dawn and dusk and sleep through the heat. Fight that rhythm and you will spend your holiday looking at empty bush.
04:45 · WakeCoffee and rusks in the dark. Be at the camp gate before it opens — there is usually a queue of people who know exactly why.
05:30 · Gate opensThe golden two hours. Predators are still active and the light is extraordinary. Drive slowly, stop constantly, keep the windows down and listen.
08:30 · BreakfastPull into a picnic site — Tshokwane, Nkuhlu, Afsaal or Mlondozi. Hire a skottel, cook properly, take an hour over it.
10:00 · Waterhole sitFind a dam or river view, switch the engine off and wait. Twenty minutes minimum. This is when most people are driving, which is exactly why it works.
11:30 · Back to campThe bush shuts down. So should you. Pool, shade, a book, a nap, a beer. This is not wasted time — it is what makes the afternoon possible.
15:30 · Out againThe second golden window. Head for water, or take a short loop you can finish comfortably before gate closing.
17:30 · Gate closesBe inside. Fine if you are not, and genuinely dangerous. Then braai, and listen — lion, hyaena and scops owl are the soundtrack.
20:00 · Night driveIf you booked one. Two hours with a spotlight, and an entirely different set of animals.
No Booking, No Cost
The best things here are free.
Beyond your conservation fee, these cost nothing at all.
01
Lake Panic hide
Signposted off the S42 near Skukuza. Arguably the finest wildlife hide in South Africa. Kingfishers, herons, hippo and crocodile at eye level, and shade all morning.
02
The Letaba Elephant Hall
A genuinely excellent museum housing the tusks of the Magnificent Seven, Kruger’s legendary big tuskers. Free, air-conditioned and far better than it sounds.
03
Sunset Dam
Just outside Lower Sabie. Hippo, crocodile, waterbuck, storks and constant traffic. You can park facing the water and stay as long as you like.
04
The Olifants viewpoint
The camp sits on a cliff a hundred metres above the river. Go at sunset with a drink and a pair of binoculars.
05
Masorini heritage site
A reconstructed Iron-Age village near Phalaborwa Gate, built on a hillside where people smelted iron centuries before Kruger existed.
06
Camp walks after dark
Most rest camps allow you to walk the fence line at night. Take a torch and look for genets in the rafters and bushbabies’ orange eyeshine in the trees.
Picnic sites are underrated
Every picnic site hires out skottelbraais and sells basics. Getting out of the car, cooking eggs and bacon in the open air and taking an hour over breakfast is, for many regulars, the best part of the day. Tshokwane’s roosterkoek is a Kruger institution.
Live Cams
Watch the waterhole from anywhere.
SANParks runs live cameras on several waterholes. Genuinely useful before a trip to see what the bush looks like right now — and quietly addictive after one.
How they work
Still cams refresh every few minutes and occasionally drop out in bad weather or a power failure. The video feeds run roughly ten minutes behind real time — SANParks caches them locally to keep the stream stable on limited bandwidth. Best viewing is early morning and the hour before dark, same as being there.
Next
Now choose the roads to drive between them.
Twelve routes chosen for what they consistently produce — with distances, timings and what to look for.
Guide · Stories & Secrets
Stories & Secrets
A lost city, a bootlegger, and a man who fought a lion with a pocketknife.
Kruger has been a national park for a century. It was a great many other things for the million years before that — a trading kingdom, a gold rush, a smugglers’ frontier. These are the best of the stories, and where you can go and stand in them.
The Collection
Fourteen things nobody tells you at the gate.
Click any one for the full story — and for exactly where in the park you can go and see what’s left of it.
The Long View
A million years, in one column.
The Big Five are recent arrivals in this story. People have been living in this landscape for an extraordinarily long time.
1 million years ago
Humans arrive, and stay
The southern Lowveld between the escarpment and the Mozambican border is continuously occupied — from Homo erectus through to modern humans.
100,000 years ago
The San
San people live throughout the region. Over a hundred rock art sites survive in what is now the park.
c. 900 AD
The trade routes open
Active trading with the Indian Ocean coast begins. Gold, ivory, copper and skins move down the Limpopo; glass beads and porcelain come back.
1250–1700
Thulamela
A stone citadel in the far north, home to as many as 2,000 people, run by goldsmiths who used gold as currency.
1725
The Dutch try, and fail
François de Cuiper’s expedition is attacked near Gomondwane and driven back out of the region.
1838
The Voortrekkers get a foothold
Trichardt and van Rensburg establish forward outposts. Then come the hunters, the ivory traders and the gold prospectors — and the game collapses.
1898
Sabie Game Reserve
Paul Kruger persuades the Transvaal parliament to protect the land between the Sabie and Crocodile rivers.
1902
Stevenson-Hamilton arrives
The first warden takes up his post and starts sweeping out the poachers — earning the name Skukuza.
1904
Wolhuter and the lion
The assistant warden kills an attacking lion with a sheath knife near Tshokwane, and lives.
1926
Kruger National Park
The Sabie and Shingwedzi reserves are amalgamated with the land between them, and proclaimed a national park.
1927
Three cars
The park opens to tourists. Three cars visit in the first year. Pretoriuskop, the first rest camp, opens.
1946
Stevenson-Hamilton retires
After 44 years. The park he leaves behind is essentially the one you drive through today.
Do It Properly
Build a day around the history.
Three itineraries that string these stories together, for the middle of the day when the animals have gone quiet anyway.
South · half day
The Skukuza trail
Stevenson-Hamilton museum for Wolhuter’s knife and the lion skin, then the prospectors’ graves in the camp, then the old Selati bridge. Drive out to the Kruger Tablets on the Tshokwane road, and take in De Laporte’s Windmill on the Pretoriuskop road on the way back.
North-central · half day
The iron trail
Masorini reconstructed Iron-Age village near Phalaborwa Gate — the smelting furnaces, the hillside dwellings, the tour. Then run east to Letaba for the Elephant Hall and the Magnificent Seven.
Far north · full day
The Thulamela trail
The stone citadel, the royal graves of Losha and Ingwe, then north to the Luvuvhu, the Pafuri picnic site under the giant trees, and Crooks Corner where three countries meet. This is a whole day and worth every hour.
The best time to do this
Between about eleven and three, when the bush shuts down and most people give up and go back to camp. Heritage sites are shaded, interpreted, and largely empty. You lose nothing in game viewing and gain a completely different understanding of where you are.
Next
Now go and find the animals.
Seventy-one mammals, with photographs, quick facts and a checklist that remembers what you’ve seen.
Guide · Routes
Self-Drive Routes
Twelve roads worth planning a day around.
Kruger has around 3,000 km of road. These are the stretches that consistently deliver — with distances, realistic timings, and what to look for on each. H roads are tar, S roads are gravel.
Before You Set Off
The rules that actually change what you see.
Ask ten Kruger regulars for advice and you get the same six answers.
01
Drive slower than you think
Twenty to thirty km/h, not fifty. At the speed limit you are travelling faster than your eyes can scan the bush. Almost everything you miss, you miss because you were going too fast.
02
Plan half the distance
A 60 km loop is a full morning, not an hour. If you plan a route that requires you to keep moving, you have already lost.
03
Gravel beats tar
S roads are slower, quieter, closer to the bush and far less driven. Almost all of them are fine in a normal car outside of heavy rain.
04
Follow the water
In the dry season everything must drink. River roads, dams and low-water bridges concentrate animals better than any other feature.
05
Stop and switch off
Twenty minutes with the engine off at a waterhole beats two hours of driving. Sound is half of game viewing and you cannot hear anything over an idling engine.
06
Watch other cars
A cluster of stopped vehicles means something. So does a car crawling with everyone looking the same way. Ask politely — most people will happily tell you.
Non-negotiables
Stay in your vehicle at all times except at designated picnic sites, camps and lookout points. Never drive off-road. Never leave the road to get closer. Speed limits are 50 km/h on tar and 40 km/h on gravel, and they are enforced by traffic officers inside the park.
The Routes
Where to point the car tomorrow.
Filter by region or surface. Timings assume you are driving properly slowly and stopping often — as you should be.
No routes match those filters.
Ready-Made Days
Four loops you can drive as written.
Full days, built around a camp, with a picnic stop in the middle and a comfortable margin before gate closing.
From Satara · Full dayThe predator loop. Out on the S100 at gate opening → H6 east to Nwanetsi picnic site for breakfast → Sweni hide → S37 or H1-3 back. Roughly 90 km. The best single day in central Kruger.
From Skukuza · Full dayThe river run. H4-1 along the Sabie to Lower Sabie → Sunset Dam → H10 up to Mlondozi for lunch with a view → Tshokwane → H1-2 back. About 130 km. Highest game density in the park.
From Berg-en-Dal · Half dayRhino country. S110 and S114 north through open bushwillow → Afsaal picnic site for breakfast → S118 or H3 back. About 70 km, and consistently good for rhino, sable and cats.
From Shingwedzi · Full dayThe northern river. S50 along the Shingwedzi → Kanniedood hide → up to Babalala picnic site → H1-6 back. Around 100 km of enormous elephant herds and almost no other cars.
Work out your timing
A safe planning figure is 25–30 km/h average once you factor in stops. So 90 km is roughly three and a half hours of actual driving, and a comfortable full morning with a long breakfast. Always add an hour of buffer before gate closing.
Technique
How experienced people actually find things.
Game spotting is a learnable skill, and almost none of it involves looking for whole animals.
Look for parts, not animals
You will almost never see a whole leopard. You will see a tail hanging from a branch, a horizontal line where everything else is vertical, or a patch of colour that is slightly wrong. Train your eye on shapes and textures rather than silhouettes.
Listen more than you look
Drive with the windows down. Alarm calls tell you everything: the explosive bark of a kudu, the metallic clicking of a tree squirrel, the snorting of impala all facing the same way. Baboons barking in trees at dusk almost always mean a leopard.
Watch what the birds do
Vultures circling means a carcass, and a carcass means predators. Oxpeckers flying in a group mean buffalo or rhino somewhere below. A drongo following something at knee height is usually following a mongoose troop.
Read the road itself
Fresh tracks in the gravel tell you what crossed and how recently. Dung tells you what and when. If you find fresh lion tracks going down the road, follow them slowly — lions use roads because walking is easier there.
Scan at different depths
Most people look at the verge. Deliberately alternate: verge, mid-distance, tree canopy, far horizon. Then repeat. Predators rest in shade fifteen to thirty metres back, which is exactly the band people skip.
Give it time in one place
The single highest-yield technique in Kruger is choosing a good waterhole and staying there. Not five minutes. Forty. Bring coffee. The animals arrive on their schedule, not yours, and almost nobody has the patience to wait — which is precisely why it works.
The best hours
The first ninety minutes after gate opening and the last ninety before closing account for the overwhelming majority of predator sightings. If you only have the energy for one drive a day, make it the morning one.
Plot Your Own
Map these routes and save your version.
The interactive map lets you trace a route point by point, get distance and drive-time estimates, and save it for the morning.
Guide · Distances & Times
Travel Matrix
Ninety kilometres is a morning, not an hour.
This is the number one thing first-timers get wrong. Kruger’s speed limits are 50 on tar and 40 on gravel, and nobody averages either. Click any two points below and get the real distance, the roads you’d take, and how long it honestly takes at three different paces.
Point to Point
Where are you going, and from where?
Choose two points for the full breakdown — distance, road-by-road route, and times at three paces.
The Full Matrix
Every camp, every gate, every combination.
Click any cell for the full route. Colours show how big a commitment the drive is at a normal pace — green is a comfortable hop, red is a whole day and needs planning around gate closing.
Under 1 hr
1–2 hrs
2–3 hrs
3–5 hrs
Over 5 hrs — plan carefully
Scroll the table sideways on a narrow screen. Row and column headers stay fixed.
Planning Rules
Six things the numbers don’t tell you.
The matrix gives you driving time. These are the things that turn a comfortable transfer into a stressful one.
01
Add an hour of buffer
Always. A single good leopard sighting costs forty minutes, and a herd of elephant crossing the road costs whatever they feel like. Arrive at camp an hour before gate closing, not five minutes.
02
Fuel is not everywhere
All main rest camps have fuel. Bushveld camps, satellite camps and hides do not. On any leg over 150 km, leave with a full tank.
03
Gravel takes longer than the maths
The model already slows for it, but corrugations, sand and wet-season damage can halve your speed. If your route is mostly S roads, add a further 20%.
04
You cannot drive at night
Everything must happen between gate opening and gate closing. In winter that is a 11.5-hour window; the long northern transfers use most of it.
05
Anything over 4 hours is a day, not a drive
Letaba to Punda Maria is not a transfer — it is your entire day’s game viewing. Plan a picnic stop, and don’t book an afternoon activity at the other end.
06
Don’t transfer on arrival day
If you enter at Malelane and sleep at Satara, you have spent your first day driving. Sleep near your gate the first night and move deeper the next morning.
How these numbers are worked out
Rather than list several hundred camp pairs, this models the park’s road network as a graph of known segments and calculates the shortest path between any two points — so the whole table stays internally consistent. Distances are approximate road kilometres for planning, not surveyed figures. Verify anything critical against the official park map.
Next
Times sorted. Now choose what to do with the hours.
Twelve self-drive routes and twelve circular day loops, with what each consistently produces.
Guide · Park Maps
Reference Maps
The real maps, at full resolution.
Ten reference maps covering the whole park — every road number, camp, dam and picnic site. Click any map to open the full-resolution viewer, or download it to print and keep in the car. All of them work without signal.
The Collection
Ten maps worth keeping.
Filter by type. The official park map is vector-sourced, so it holds detail at any zoom or print size — the others have been upscaled and sharpened for screen and A3 printing.
Choosing
Which map for which job.
They each answer a different question. Take two or three, not all eight.
Navigating, dailyThe official park map. Print it at A3, fold it into the door pocket, and use it for every drive. It is the only one you genuinely need.
Planning a day’s driveThe regional map for where you are staying. These name every side road, dam and loop, which the whole-park map has no room for.
Deciding where to go at allThe ten best drives. Distances between camps are marked, so you can sanity-check a route before committing a morning to it.
Understanding what you’re seeingThe geology map. Granite in the west, basalt in the east. That single line explains the grass, which explains the grazers, which explains the cats.
Managing expectations at homeThe coverage map. Check it before you promise anyone you’ll call from Shingwedzi.
Why geology matters more than it sounds
Kruger is split down its length by rock type. The granite west weathers to sandy, nutrient-poor soil that grows sourveld — good browsing, thicker bush. The basalt east weathers to rich clay that grows sweet, nutritious grass — which is why the eastern plains around Satara carry the zebra and wildebeest herds, and therefore the lions. Once you can read that boundary, the park stops being random.
Practical
Printing and taking them offline.
Signal disappears fast in Kruger. Sort this out before you arrive.
01
Print the official map at A3
Use the PDF or the 600 dpi PNG. A3 is the sweet spot — road numbers stay legible and it still folds into a door pocket. Laminate it if you are going in the wet season.
02
Save the regional map to your phone
Download the JPG for the region you are staying in and save it to your photos. It will open instantly with no signal, and you can pinch to zoom on any road number.
03
Buy the printed park map too
The official SANParks map is sold at every camp shop and gate for very little. It is more current than anything online, and it supports the park.
A note on upscaling
The official map came from a vector source, so its high-resolution versions contain genuine detail. The regional and thematic maps were supplied as smaller images and have been enlarged two-and-a-half to three times with edge sharpening — they are markedly more comfortable to read on a large screen or in print, but enlargement cannot invent detail that was not in the original.
Next
Maps in hand. Now pick the drive.
Twelve routes and twelve circular loops, with what each one consistently produces.
Scroll or pinch to zoom · drag to pan
Guide · Fees & Wild Card
What It Costs
What you actually pay to be here.
A daily conservation fee per person, accommodation on top, and activities on top of that. Then the question everyone asks: is the Wild Card worth it? There is a calculator below that answers it in your exact circumstances.
Daily Conservation Fee
Charged per person, per day.
Payable for every day you spend inside the park, settled at reception when you check in. Three tiers, and which one you fall into depends on your documents.
What that gets you, and what it doesn’t
What you pay on top
Accommodation is entirely separate, and ranges from a campsite pitch to a luxury lodge suite. Activities — morning drives, night drives, bush walks, wilderness trails — are charged per person on top of that.
So a realistic budget for a Kruger day is: conservation fee × people, plus your bed, plus anything you booked.
Keep the receipt
Your conservation fee receipt is your exit permit. You will be asked for it at the gate on the way out, and without it you will not be allowed to leave. Put it somewhere obvious and leave it there for the whole trip.
Kruger runs largely cash-free — cards work at gates, camps, shops, restaurants and fuel stations.
The Actual Question
Does the Wild Card pay for itself?
Enter your trip. This compares what you would pay in daily conservation fees against the cost of the relevant card, and tells you straight.
Count every day in any SANParks park over the next twelve months, not just this Kruger trip — that is what the card covers.
Wild Card Pricing
Six clusters. Only two of them include Kruger.
This is where people waste money. The CapeNature and Msinsi clusters do not cover national parks at all — buying one of those for a Kruger trip gets you nothing at the gate.
The R35 decision
An individual SANParks cluster is R895. All Parks — the same national parks plus 60-odd CapeNature, Msinsi and Eswatini reserves — is R930. Thirty-five rand. If there is the faintest chance you will visit a Western Cape reserve or a KZN resort in the next twelve months, take All Parks.
Where It Works
Every national park in the country, one card.
Grouped by province, so you can see what is actually near you — and what is worth building a trip around.
The interactive parks map is online only
It needs a live tile server, and a tile server needs a signal. Every park it plots is listed by province below, and that list works with no connection at all.
What All Parks adds on top
For R35 more than the SANParks cluster, these three come with it.
Pairings worth planning
The obvious pairing
Kruger + Blyde
Most people driving to Kruger from Johannesburg pass the Panorama Route. Add a day or two in the Mpumalanga escarpment and the card is already working harder.
The big one
Kruger + Kgalagadi
Two of the great African parks, both on the same card. Utterly different landscapes — red dunes and black-maned lion versus lowveld bushveld.
The city one
Table Mountain
Table Mountain National Park charges conservation fees at Cape Point, Boulders Beach and Silvermine. If you are in Cape Town for a few days as well, that alone can tip the maths.
Small Print
The things worth knowing before you buy.
None of these are hidden, but all of them catch somebody out every season.
How membership works
The three categories
Non-transferable
The named people on a card cannot be changed during the year. Buy it in the name of whoever will actually be travelling, and think about who that is before you check out.
Buy It
You need a SANParks account first.
The card can be bought online or at participating gates and receptions — but check the gate sells it before relying on that.
Guide · Plan
Plan Your Visit
Everything you need to know before you go.
Gates, times, seasons, fees, health, packing and rules — plus the handful of mistakes almost every first-timer makes, and how to skip them.
Timing
When to go, and what you trade.
There is no bad time to visit Kruger. There are only different trade-offs between game viewing, scenery, heat and crowds.
Dry season · May to September
Game viewingExcellent. Grass dies back, trees drop leaves, and animals concentrate at permanent water.
WeatherCold early mornings (5–12°C), warm dry days (23–28°C). Almost no rain.
MosquitoesLow. Malaria risk at its lowest.
CrowdsBusy in June–July school holidays; quiet in May and early September.
Best forFirst visits, predators, photography with clear sightlines.
Wet season · October to April
Game viewingHarder. Thick green bush hides everything, and animals spread out as water is everywhere.
WeatherHot and humid (28–38°C) with dramatic afternoon thunderstorms.
MosquitoesHigh. Take malaria precautions seriously.
CrowdsVery busy over December–January; quiet February and March.
Best forBirding (migrants arrive), newborn animals, green landscapes, lower rates.
The sweet spots
May — the bush has thinned but is still green, it is not yet cold, and the June holiday crowds have not arrived. September — peak dry-season game viewing with warm days, just before the rains break. Both are outside South African school holidays.
Gates & Times
Nine gates, and times that change monthly.
Camp gates open earlier than entrance gates in midsummer — as early as 04:30 in November, December and January — which gives residents a genuine head start on day visitors. Everything closes at the same time.
Gate times by month
| Month | Entrance gate | Camp gate | Both close |
|---|
Verify before you travel
These are the long-standing standard times, but SANParks adjusts them. Confirm on the official site or at reception on arrival — late arrival at camp carries a fine.
The nine entrance gates
MalelaneSouth, off the N4. Closest to Berg-en-Dal (12 km). Best for arrivals from Johannesburg.
Crocodile BridgeSouth-east near Komatipoort. Doubles as a rest camp. Game-rich immediately.
NumbiSouth-west near Hazyview. Closest to Pretoriuskop (9 km).
PhabeniSouth-west near Hazyview. The quickest route to Skukuza.
Paul KrugerThe main western gate — 12 km to Skukuza on tar.
OrpenCentral-west near Hoedspruit. A straight 46 km run to Satara.
PhalaborwaNorthern-central, at Phalaborwa town. 51 km to Letaba.
Punda MariaFar north near Thohoyandou. Gateway to the wildest section.
PafuriNorthernmost, near the Zimbabwe border.
GiriyondoBorder post into Limpopo NP, Mozambique. Passport required, 4x4 recommended, restricted hours.
Getting There
By road, or straight to the runway.
Most visitors drive. Flying into the region and hiring a car at the airport saves a long day at the wheel.
From JohannesburgRoughly 5–6 hours to the southern gates on the N4 through Nelspruit. The most common approach by far.
From PretoriaSimilar, about 5 hours to Malelane on the N4.
From Durban / KZNAround 8–9 hours via Piet Retief and Barberton. Best broken into two days.
Fly to Nelspruit (KMIA)Kruger Mpumalanga International — about an hour from the southern gates. Best-served airport, full car hire.
Fly to Skukuza (SZK)Directly inside the park. Land and be on a game drive within minutes. Car hire available on site.
Fly to Hoedspruit (HDS)Best for Orpen Gate and the central region, and for the private reserves.
Fly to Phalaborwa (PHW)Gate is essentially at the airport. Ideal for the north.
VehicleA normal sedan is fine for all tar and nearly all gravel roads. Higher clearance helps after heavy rain. You do not need a 4x4 unless you are booked on an eco trail.
Money
Conservation fees and the Wild Card.
You pay a daily conservation fee per person on top of accommodation. Rates differ for South African citizens, SADC residents and international visitors, and they change annually.
Daily conservation fee
How it works
Is a WILD Card worth it?
A WILD Card gives unlimited entry to SANParks reserves for a year and wipes out the daily conservation fee entirely — you show the card and matching ID at reception and pay nothing.
The maths is simple. A South African adult pays R134 a day. A week in Kruger is close to a thousand rand per adult before you have slept anywhere. For international visitors at R602 a day, a card can pay for itself in a matter of days.
As a rule: if you will spend more than about a week inside national parks in a year, buy the card. For a single two-night visit, don’t.
About the WILD CardWhat else you’ll pay for
Accommodation is charged separately, from a campsite pitch to a luxury lodge suite. Guided activities — drives, walks, trails — are extra again and booked per person.
Paying inside the park
Kruger runs largely cash-free. Cards are accepted at gates, camps, shops, restaurants and fuel stations. Carry a little cash for tips and the odd picnic-site kiosk.
Don’t lose the receipt
Your conservation fee receipt is your exit permit. Without it you will not be allowed out of the gate — keep it somewhere obvious for the whole trip.
Verify current rates
Health & Safety
Malaria, heat and the things that actually hurt people.
Kruger is a very safe place to travel. The genuine risks are boring ones, and all of them are manageable.
01
Malaria
Kruger is a malaria area, with risk highest from November to April. Speak to a doctor or travel clinic about prophylaxis well before you go. Use repellent from late afternoon, wear long sleeves at dusk, and sleep with the fan or aircon running.
02
Heat and dehydration
Summer days regularly exceed 35°C in a car with the windows down. Carry far more water than you think you need, and treat the middle of the day as rest time.
03
Sun
You are exposed for hours through open windows, and one arm burns badly. Sunscreen, a hat and sunglasses every single day.
04
Driving
The most common serious incident in Kruger is a road accident, not an animal attack. Speed limits exist because elephants step out of thick bush without warning.
05
Animals in camp
Camps are fenced but not sealed. Honey badgers, hyaena, baboons and monkeys come in. Never leave food out, never feed anything, and keep bungalow doors closed.
06
Medical help
There is a doctor at Skukuza and first-aid facilities at main rest camps. Serious cases are evacuated to Nelspruit. Carry your own chronic medication and a basic kit.
If you feel ill after your trip
Malaria symptoms can appear up to several weeks after exposure and often resemble flu. If you develop fever, chills or severe headache within a month of visiting, tell your doctor immediately that you have been in a malaria area.
What to Pack
The things people wish they had brought.
Beyond the obvious. This is the list assembled from what regulars never travel without.
Essential
Binoculars
The single highest-impact item you can pack. One pair per person, not one for the car — sharing ruins sightings. 8x42 is the sweet spot.
Essential
A proper field guide
A mammal and bird guide beats a phone in bright sun and never runs out of battery. Roberts or Sasol for birds.
Essential
Torch or headlamp
For camp after dark, finding things in the bungalow, and spotting bushbabies in the trees.
Clothing
Layers, in neutral colours
Freezing at 05:00 and 30°C by 10:00. Fleece plus a windbreaker over a t-shirt. Avoid bright white and dark blue.
Comfort
A cooler box and ice
Cold drinks on a hot afternoon drive change everything. Buy ice at camp shops.
Comfort
A bean bag or window mount
If you photograph at all. Hand-holding a long lens from a car seat produces blur, every time.
Practical
Offline maps and a car charger
Signal is patchy and non-existent in the north. Download maps before you enter, and bring a 12V charger.
Practical
Braai gear and firelighters
Every camp has a braai. Buy wood at the shop, but bring tongs, firelighters and matches.
Practical
Insect repellent
DEET-based, applied from late afternoon. Also useful against the mopane flies in the north.
Park Rules
The rules exist because someone already tried it.
Almost every rule in Kruger traces back to an incident. Take them seriously and the park is remarkably safe.
Always
- Stay inside your vehicle except in camps, at picnic sites and at designated lookout points.
- Be inside a camp before gate closing time. Fines apply, and driving after dark is genuinely dangerous.
- Observe 50 km/h on tar and 40 km/h on gravel — traffic officers patrol inside the park.
- Give animals right of way, always, including when they are on the road for twenty minutes.
- Keep noise down at sightings and switch your engine off where you can.
Never
- Never feed any animal. A fed baboon becomes aggressive and is eventually destroyed.
- Never drive off-road or on roads marked as closed — not even a metre for a better photo.
- Never litter, and never throw anything, including fruit peels, from a vehicle.
- Never use a drone. They are banned in all national parks.
- Never geotag rhino images or share their locations on social media.
- Never hoot, call or play sounds to attract an animal’s attention.
Learn From Others
Seven mistakes almost every first-timer makes.
None of them ruin a trip. All of them cost you sightings.
Driving too fast, and too far
The most common mistake by a wide margin. People plan 200 km days and spend the whole time watching the clock. Halve your planned distance and double your stopping time — you will see far more and enjoy it more.
Sleeping in and missing the gate
The first ninety minutes after gate opening produce most of the predator sightings. If you are leaving camp at 08:00, you have missed the best part of the day. Set the alarm for 04:45 and nap at midday instead.
Not booking a guided drive
Self-drivers cannot leave camp before gate opening or stay out after closing. A guided drive can. That alone is worth the price, and the elevated open vehicle changes what you can see into thick bush.
Sticking to the tar roads
The H roads are faster and busier. The S roads are slower, quieter, closer to the bush and where most of the memorable sightings happen. Almost all are fine in a normal car.
Treating the Big Five as a checklist
People drive past a wild dog pack to look for a rhino. The Big Five is a hunting-era term with no ecological meaning. A honey badger crossing the road at dusk is a rarer sighting than four of the five.
Only booking one camp
If you have five or more nights, split them between regions. The south and the north are so different they may as well be separate parks, and the drive between them is a full day of game viewing in itself.
Underestimating the middle of the day
Many visitors force themselves to drive through the 11:00–15:00 dead zone and end up exhausted, having seen nothing. Go back to camp. Swim, eat, sleep. Then be sharp for the afternoon window when it actually matters.
Questions
The rest of what people ask.
Short answers to the practical things.
Is there mobile signal and wifi?
Patchy. Main camps in the south generally have signal and some offer wifi; the north is largely without. Download offline maps and anything you need before you enter, and treat being unreachable as part of the point.
Can I take children?
Absolutely, and it is one of the great family destinations. Guided walks have a minimum age of 12. Camps with pools and shorter loop drives — Berg-en-Dal, Pretoriuskop, Lower Sabie — work best with small children.
Are there shops and restaurants?
Every main rest camp has a shop selling groceries, drinks, firewood and curios, and most have a restaurant or cafeteria. Bushveld camps, bush lodges and hides have none — bring everything.
Can I braai?
Yes, and you should. Every unit and campsite has a braai, and camp shops sell wood and charcoal. Communal kitchens are available at all main camps.
What if I break down?
Stay in your vehicle. Flag down a passing car and ask them to report it at the next camp or gate. There is a workshop at Skukuza. Do not walk, whatever the distance.
Can I visit for just a day?
Yes. Day visitors pay the conservation fee at the gate, and daily entry quotas apply at busier gates. Arrive at opening time and head for a river road — but consider that you will be leaving at exactly the hour the animals start moving again.
Is it accessible for wheelchairs?
Increasingly. Main rest camps have adapted units, and several hides and viewpoints are accessible. SANParks publishes a facilities list for visitors with disabilities — check it before booking a specific camp.
What about petrol?
All main rest camps and most gates have fuel, and cards are accepted. Bushveld camps do not. Fill up before long northern drives and never let the tank drop below a quarter.
You’re Ready
Book the camp. The rest follows.
Reservations open eleven months ahead. Once your dates are locked in, everything else on this guide falls into place.
Guide · Emergency
Emergency & Contacts
The numbers to have before you need them.
Signal disappears fast in Kruger, and it always disappears at the worst moment. Save these to your phone now, and screenshot the page — it works with no connection at all once loaded.
Before you drive through the gate
Save +27 (0)13 735 4325 to your phone as “Kruger Emergency”. Save your camp’s reception number too. Then take a screenshot of this page. Once it has loaded it works entirely offline, which matters more than anything else on this list — much of the northern half of the park has no signal at all.
Camp Contacts
Every reception, and the phone that answers at night.
The duty mobile is the after-hours number — the one that gets picked up when the reception desk has closed. Tap any number to call it.
No camp matches that search.
Why some camps share a number
Smaller camps are administered from a nearby main camp and share its switchboard — Balule through Olifants, Tamboti and Maroela through Orpen, Tsendze and the Shipandani hide through Mopani. That is normal, and the staff there can reach your camp.
Reservations & Enquiries
Who to email, and when to just phone.
One address handles the overwhelming majority of bookings. The rest is knowing when email is the wrong tool.
Getting a useful reply
Why individual staff emails aren’t listed here
SANParks publishes named addresses for camp managers and duty managers on its own camp contacts page, but deliberately obscures them so they cannot be harvested by spam bots. Reproducing them here would defeat that, so this guide links to the source instead.
In practice you rarely need them. For a camp, phone the reception number above — someone is there. For a booking, use central reservations.
Medical
Where the help actually is.
Main rest camps have first-aid facilities and there is a doctor at Skukuza. Anything serious is evacuated out of the park.
Two things worth doing in advance
Carry your own chronic medication and a basic first-aid kit — camp shops stock very little. And remember that Kruger is a malaria area: if you develop fever, chills or a severe headache within a month of your trip, tell a doctor immediately that you have been in a malaria zone. This guide is informational and is not medical advice.
If It Happens
What to do, in order.
Five situations worth having read once, calmly, before you are in one of them.
The rule underneath all of these
Stay in your vehicle. Breakdown, accident, animal, lost — it does not matter. The single most dangerous thing you can do in Kruger is get out and walk. Flag down another car, send a message with them, and wait.
One More Thing
Check the coverage map before you rely on a phone.
Much of the north has no signal. Know where you will and won’t be reachable, and tell someone at home your route.
Guide · Offline
Before You Drive In
The whole guide, on the phone.
This happens by itself. The first time you open the guide on wifi it quietly stores every page, map and photograph on the device — then it works at Satara with no bars at all. The button below is only here if you want to force it, or check.
Status
What is on this device.
Checking…Online
—App files stored
—Maps & photographs stored
—Space used on this device
Roughly 60–80 MB all in, most of it the high-resolution park maps and the species photographs. Every animal also has a locally-drawn plate behind its photograph, so a card is never blank even if a photograph cannot be fetched. if you need the space back — the guide itself stays.
Installing
Make it a real app icon.
Installed, it opens full screen with no address bar and behaves like any other app on the phone.
iPhone and iPad
Open the guide in Safari — this only works in Safari, not Chrome. Tap the share button, scroll down, tap Add to Home Screen. Safari is the only browser on iOS allowed to install a web app.
Android
In Chrome, tap the three dots and choose Install app or Add to Home screen. If the Install as an app button above is showing, that does the same thing in one tap.
Leave it open for a minute on wifi
It starts saving itself the moment it opens — a small note at the bottom of the screen tells you how far along it is. On mobile data it deliberately holds back the 50 MB of park maps and photographs so it cannot eat your bundle; the button above forces it if you want them anyway.
Test it honestly
Put the phone in flight mode at home and open the guide. If everything loads — mammals, camps, maps, the field map — you are ready. Better to find a gap on your sofa than at Olifants.
What Works Without Signal
All of it, bar one thing.
Yes
The whole guide
All 71 mammals and 131 birds with photographs, 33 camps, the stories, routes, activities, fees, gate times and the drive-time matrix. Every word is stored on the device.
Yes
The field map and GPS
Drawn from data rather than downloaded tiles. GPS needs satellites, not a network, so your position is live wherever you are in the park.
Yes
The park maps
All ten reference sheets, full resolution, pinch to zoom. Stored on the device automatically the first time you open the guide on wifi.
Yes
Your checklists
Species ticked off, sightings logged and trip to-dos are written to the phone itself and never need a connection.
Yes
Emergency numbers
Every number is stored, and a phone call needs far less signal than data does. A bar that will not load a web page will still place a call.
No
The live webcams
The one genuinely online feature. The links are there and will work the moment you have a signal again — at Skukuza, or back on the N4.
A word on map tiles
You might expect a downloaded satellite or street map. OpenStreetMap's usage policy expressly forbids pre-downloading tiles for offline use — it is community-funded infrastructure and bulk downloads get blocked. So the in-park map is drawn from the guide's own road and camp data instead. It is lighter, sharper at any zoom, and nobody's server pays for it. Tiles you have actually looked at on the online map are cached normally, which is allowed.