We went to the Kruger Park for a week, returning last week Tuesday. It turned out better than I expected it to be. I was actually not looking forward to it much at all.A whole crowd went up to celebrate a friend's 40th over the week-end. Most flew. Others took and extended holiday and spent a whole week in the park. We didn't have the luxury of lots of time or money, so we drove up with friends and their 2 boys in their mini bus.
4 adults and 4 boys - under 5, in a mini-bus for a week and doing over 4000km! It didn't seem like a brilliant plan to me, but I thought it could be an adventure...
Everyone was amazing in the car and the kids played quietly together most of the time. We
swapped them around a lot, so they had a different partner after each stop, and a different supervising adult too, and I think that was the secret to keeping them entertained and out of each other's hair.We had activities for them to do. A box of small toys, a box of books, and a work book each with pictures of animals to cut and paste and crayons and colouring in pages. That kept them busy for AGES. They worked in their books everyday. I was actually amazed at how much attention they gave their books, and how well they looked after them - even the little guys both just about 3 years old now. We also had lots of interesting snacks (nuts, raisins, oaties cereal, fruit, caramel pop-corn, lolli-pops, crisps, dried fruit, biscuits etc).
Even though we were in the car for more than 7 hours each day they handled it fine, and in a whole week we only got 2 requests to stop to wee other than at our designated stopping points. We managed to get most of our mileage done early in the day, so that they had the afternoons and evening to run and play at our stop over spots, so that worked well.
We took 2 nights to drive up and 2 nights back and only had 2 nights in the park. The children also enjoyed the park and game spotting more than I expected, and Griffin (luckily) really enjoyed Impala spotting, and was excited every time we saw one, he'd yell "IMPALA!", and then tell him self "Well spotted". Luckily there are literally 100s of thousands of Impala, so he was continually amused. The park is VERY dry at the moment, and there actually wasn't a lot of game to be seen. Nearly all the rivers are dry, and apparently most of the Impala are losing their pregnancies :(. We were lucky to see Lion twice and Cheetah twice, both times quite close, all the boys loved that.
When we were looking at 2 ground-hornbills on one side of the vehicle, I caught Griffin dangling his arm out the other side to another ground-hornbill he'd found singing 'come bite me, come bit me!'. I had to explain that that was not a good idea! I think he was trying to make things more interesting.
Quinn started drawing really sweet pictures of the animals he'd seen in his book on the way home, and his ground-hornbill is excellent Everyone has recognised it.
So I think it was a wonderful worthwhile trip in the end which we all enjoyed. It was nice to spend so much time right with the children , and not have to do anything other than interact with them for most of the time.
