It’s no secret – we have been madly in love with Kruger ever since our first trip there together, back in 2006. But after all these years exploring Kruger, we decided that we need to spread our wings and explore other National Parks as well. So our first visit to a “new” park would be a week in Mapungubwe.
Planning this trip was very different from planning a Kruger trip. We know Kruger. We know what to expect, what is on offer, and what we want. We didn’t know anything about Mapugubwe, besides a little bit about its rich history and where it is located. After trawling the SANParks forum for a while, we ended up booking the first three nights in Leokwe, and the following 4 in the Limpopo Forest Tented Camp.
As it turned out, we were lucky enough to arrive at the park hot on the heals of several days of heavy rains. This meant that while we had mostly glorious weather, everything was drenched. The Limpopo and Shashe rivers were both in full flood. The veld alternated between long, abundantly seeding grasses that attracted swarms of Red-Billed Quelias, and riotous masses of flowering duwweltjies. And the Maloutswa hide… Oh my! We’ll get to that later…
First, lets start at the beginning – lunch-with-a-view at the cafe at the interpretive center.
