Our mission this morning was to get out of Jo'berg as soon as humanly possible. The alarm went off at 7am and we were up, showered and out the door by 7:30. A quick breakfast and then it was on the bus back to the airport to pick up our rental car.

We got a little Renault this time, which we don't love as much as our little VW Polo Simba, but it will get us where we need to go - we hope. We've called this one Pumba in keeping with the lion king names.

So now we're off. It's a 450km drive from the airport to our camp in Kruger and there is nothing to see along the way. The landscape is really dry with that washed out grass. It reminded me of the Canberra / Sydney drive, only longer. We also had some technical difficulties with the music. I've been plugging my iPhone in for some traveling tunes and for some reason the radio in this car seems to only play the music and you can't hear the singing. So it's like the karaoke version of every song. It's a bit much but so is South African radio so what do you do?! A lot of fidgeting apparently.

We arrived at the park at around 3:30ish and about 5 minutes after coming through the gate we saw our first animals. A group of impalas were feeding just near the road. We were so excited and snapped away a dozen shots of them. A little further down the road and we saw a couple of zebras. We even got to see a warthog very quickly but he ran off before we got too close. We came up on a big group of zebras and one of them had a little baby with her so off when the camera again with a couple of hundred more shots. Just before we turned off to check into our first rest camp we saw two massive elephants eating beside the road. One of them was so close and kept flapping it's ears. We tried to get a shot of it with is ears out but couldn't quite make it. But a least there is some more photos to look through.

The gates of the camp close at 5:30 and we got in here with an hour to spare. We have a little hut in the Skukuza rest camp for the next couple of nights and there's a big waterhole next to it where the animals come to drink. We have a viewing deck that looks over it and at sunset we could see a group of hippos swimming through the water. There also seems to be a few monkeys that roam free around the camp. It's just an amazing experience to be here.

When we were booking our holiday from home we booked in for a sunrise safari tomorrow morning thinking that it would leave at around 6:30 but when we checked in with reception they quite happily told us we have to meet our guides at 5am. 5 AM !!!! Can you believe it ?! I don't think I'm designed to be functioning at that hour of the morning.