The tar roads in Kruger National Park allow for just about any kind of vehicle to game drive, something we haven’t seen before. The park maintains the many dirt tracks, something else we haven’t seen in many parks. The camping experience is quite different, people come into the park with their travel trailers towing a small car which they use to explore the roads, somewhat like in the US. This took some getting used to. Special campsites in the Kruger are highly coveted and reservations are booked a year in advance. We haven’t gotten used to that yet.

Rules abound for visitors. Don’t get out of your car except in a designated site. Preferably fenced. No jogging – they had to make a rule for that?? Only block the lane where the animal is, leave the other lane open – now there’s a rule made to be broken in those “Yellowstone moments”, as we call them. No speeding, but even at 20k an hour, far under the speed limit, if you hit a lizard or a tortoise it is curtains for the creature. When I see a pile of bones by the roadside I used to think a lion killed something there, but now I realize it is more likely a vehicle. Some scavenger made a meal of the unlucky creature I hope.

One directive is consistently broken by everyone at sightings. Do not put any part of your body out of the vehicle at a sighting. Not your arm or your head and certainly not your torso. This is known as “breaking the plane.” As a rule animals see vehicles as something solid. Studies have been done using dummies to demonstrate what happens when a limb sticks out of the flat plane of a car. Lions attack and they are quick about it. Leopards claw what is sticking out of a window. But humans aren’t dummies, right? That’s questionable.

We witnessed an episode of breaking the plane on our way to the Orpen Gate. We’d stopped to admire a very pregnant lioness. She was relaxed, laying on some sand near the road. Other vehicles were observing. Then suddenly her body tensed. Her head went up and her vision narrowed and her jaw elongated. She was staring at the road – what could she be so fixated on? Along came a SansPark pick-up truck with four guys standing up in the bed, their heads well over the cab. That lioness stared and stared as they drove past, eyeing them like they were meat at the butchery. The four guys broke the plane. Likely a good thing she was so heavy, there could have been chaos (plus some crazy YouTube videos). And then on we went, inside the Beagle where it is safe. At least from lion.