This world-famous national park is my cure for modern stresses

February 12, 2026 — 5:00am

The world falls away as I cross the boundary into Kruger National Park. The past lies behind me, and a new chapter begins. Ahead lies an endless network of roads upon which I will acquire new memories, and a tract of bushveld so immense it measures the size of a small country. Wild animals are the only sovereign citizens of this undomesticated state; their territory is dictated by the elements – most recently torrential rain and floods that reconfigured the landscape and forced the park to close.

The park has tentatively reopened, and devotees are revving at the gates (check the SANParks website to see which gates and camps are open). Indeed, it’s difficult to describe to those who haven’t spent time embedded here the allure of South Africa’s largest national park, a 360-kilometre-long, 65-kilometre-wide sanctuary safeguarded from civilisation on the border of Zimbabwe and Mozambique in the northeast of the country. Named for Boer statesman Paul Kruger, it was gazetted in 1926 when the Sabi and Shingwedzi game reserves were consolidated.

The park officially turns 100 in 2026 – and I’ve been savouring its embrace for almost half its life. There’s not a remote dirt road I haven’t rumbled along in an old Volkswagen Kombi, no waterhole at which I haven’t stopped, pulled out a thermos, and waited for nature to seduce me. I’m soothed by memories of Ouma rusks dipped into sunrise coffees, icy Castle Lagers on demonically hot days, the scent of braais lighting up around a circle of rondavels – all necessities for a quintessentially South African safari.

My earliest memory of Kruger is from a school excursion when I was eight years old. We stayed at Pretoriuskop camp in the park’s southwestern corner, and took game drives in a school bus. Through streaky glass I snapped pictures with my Kodak camera: a blurry bird, an expressionless waterbuck. With the pocket money I’d saved I bought my mother a small tray painted the colour of yellow thatching grass and embossed with giraffes. For years she would deliver my father’s morning tea on that trinket; when she died two decades later I found it in one of her kitchen drawers.

Periodic visits followed, but my parents were more likely to take my siblings and me camping in Mozambique, trout fishing in Magoebaskloof or road-tripping from Johannesburg to the Eastern Cape’s Wild Coast.

It was only after I’d left home that I began returning regularly with my Kruger-loving boyfriend. Later, we spent our two-week honeymoon traversing the park’s length and breadth. Every year before and after we’d drive to SANParks headquarters in Pretoria to book our annual trip. This was pre-internet, and though we could make arrangements telephonically, it was more efficient to do so in person.

Our itinerary would depend on seasonal (read: flood-induced) road closures, availability at our favourite camps and the distances we’d have to cover between them. When we moved to Mpumalanga province we’d spend weekends in Kruger, introducing our three children to this most hallowed of places.

Such elemental love and expedition-like dedication are characteristics often obscured from international visitors, who tend to experience safaris as luxurious sojourns. Private concessions encompassed by the Greater Kruger National Park deliver extraordinary experiences (and contribute immensely to conservation and the country’s GDP). But locals, who comprise around 80 per cent of the park’s annual visitors, typically take the more affordable self-drive route. Burrowing into a landscape that existed long before colonisation and apartheid reshaped it, these pilgrims honour Paul Kruger’s desire to protect their priceless national heritage.

Decades of immersion have taught me that a journey to Kruger is not an opportunity to tick off a species checklist; rather, it’s bush medicine. The world beyond becomes redundant; ego is quelled and expectations suppressed; nature alone decides what I will see. Here, landscape is the inscrutable hero and I the patient eyewitness – a sublime curative in this era of chaos and quick fixes.

Over the decades I’ve fallen more deeply in love with birds and dung beetles, with the scent of rondavels’ thatched roofs, with the roar of silence, emptiness and – occasionally – rivers in flood. Encounters have been chiselled into my psyche: the black mamba ingesting a chameleon; the sun setting so rapidly beyond my hilly lookout I could almost see the earth spinning; the elephant charging front-on as we reversed at speed down a precipitous dirt road; and, years later, my tiny daughter cowering in the footwell every time we passed a herd, as though she were epigenetically programmed to fear these creatures.

Kruger has evolved over the decades, too. More visitors than ever congregate in the park’s southern reaches, and etiquette isn’t always respected. Still, it remains my steadfastly happy place, a century-old snapshot of the primordial past. One day in the far-off future – perhaps after I’ve celebrated my own centenary – my ashes will be tossed to the hot winds where they can ride the thermals high above those mercurial rivers.