As someone who studied and hopes to work with wildlife, Africa was a dream destination of mine and it was totally worth the long flight. Throughout my trip, I went on numerous safaris and had the most incredible wildlife experiences! Here’s my guide to viewing wildlife in Africa. It includes my top five safari recommendations as well as a few bonus notable mentions.
My guide to viewing wildlife in Africa: top five places
Etosha National Park, Namibia
As I mentioned in my first blog post about Africa, Etosha NP was my favourite place to go on safari because of the range of wildlife we saw. Etosha NP was also unique amongst the parks we visited because it had waterholes! The one at the campsite was particularly awesome and was a great place to watch the sun set and animals pour in to have a drink. If you’d like to read more about Etosha, click here.
Matobo National Park, Zimbabwe
If it weren’t for the range of wildlife in Etosha NP, Matobo NP would make the top spot. We saw a 9-DAY-OLD WHITE RHINO BABY! So cute! We also got to get up really close with all the rhinos because it was predominantly a walking safari. If you go with Acacia Africa, a half-day tour is included but I’d definitely recommend upgrading to the full day. You get to see so much more of the park and we would have missed that baby rhino because we saw him right at the end of the day.
Elephant Sands Campsite
This campsite was incredible because it allowed you to get up close and personal with wild elephants! I mean sure, I left the campsite terrified of elephants (you can read about that here) but I also got the best pictures!
Okavango Delta, Botswana
What I really loved about the Okavango Delta was the range of wildlife we saw. We saw everything from the tiniest frogs to huge elephants! Here, we did two walking safaris (one in the evening and the other the next morning), but we also saw wildlife as we travelled by mokoro.
Chobe National Park, Botswana
Here, we went on both a land safari and a river cruise, which was cool because we saw different animals on both! On our safari, we saw elephants playing in the mud and a tower of giraffes, but on our cruise we saw hippos and crocodiles. Admittedly I wasn’t as impressed with the crocs as everyone else but you wouldn’t be either if you had fed a MUCH BIGGER croc at the zoo!
There’s one place I haven’t mentioned…
You’ll no doubt have noticed I didn’t mention Kruger National Park. Nothing against Kruger, I really enjoyed my day there. But compared to the other places it was very commercialised. We had to queue up to see lions. And the view wasn’t even good. We also queued up TWICE to get this leopard picture:
Admittedly, it was our first and only time seeing a leopard so it was kind of worth it… just to make the Big 5! In my opinion, Kruger was great for seeing Big Cats, but aside from that it was kind of same old by the time I got there. It’d be loads more impressive if it was the first national park you went to. You can read all of the pros and cons of visiting Kruger National Park by clicking here.
Other notable mentions
All of my top five places were national parks where we went on some kind of safari. But you can also view wildlife in other areas of Africa. So here are a few more notable mentions:
In the Sossusvlei area, we went on a creatures of the desert tour (which you can read about here) where we got to see Zebras and small animals like lizards and spiders. There was also a lot of wildlife in the Cape Town area! I made the trip out to Simon’s Town to see the penguins (which was incredible!) but I also saw Dassies and lizards on Table Mountain, Ostriches and Baboons in the Cape Penninsula National Park, seals in the harbour and lots of beautiful birds in the Kirstenboch National Botanical Gardens. Oh, and there was squirrels in the trees around my hostel? I thought squirrels were only found in Europe and North America but apparently not. You learn something new every day! You can read about my time in Cape Town here, and the Cape Peninsula tour I went on here.
Video guide to viewing wildlife in Africa
I wasn’t planning on making a video of my trip to Africa, but I ended up with so much animal footage that I had to make one! Apparently I got the species name for Giraffe wrong, which is pretty embarrassing… Hopefully the rest is okay! At the bottom of each clip, I have included the location it was taken.
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