TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums Africa Kruger Park- From Johannesburg, instead of plane..

Hi,

I'm just doing some research about a potential south africa trip.

Here are a few questions I have:

1) I found out that ground transportation from Johannesburg to some hotels I was interested in around Kruger is a 4-5 hour trip. Has anyone done this before by taxi or other means etc.. (besides plane)

2) Has anyone heard of Perry's Bridge Hollow hotel boutique? from their website, it looks really nice, and they offer day trip safari's to Kruger as well.

What I plan on doing is flying from London to Egypt, stay a few days in egypt, then fly to either Cape town or Johannesburg, i'm just scared of the inter country flights (CT to Joh), i dont know much about the safety records of south african airlines.

SAA does a lot of the inter country flights. I found them to be quite safe. Kalulu another good carrier.

It is a long drive, we did it in a rental car, so we could drive through Krugar on our own. Krugar is huge and it gets a lot of traffic.

We went to a private lodge outside of Krugar and it was great, just us a guide and tracker in a Land Rover. Ingwee (means Leopard) was the name of the lodge and it was abot 20,000 acres. We found that about 4 days of game was enough. The nice part about the lodge is during the day when you are hanging around (you go out AM and evening), you could hang out by the pool and have cocktails.

We flew with SAA on 8 hops around South Africa in 1995 in everything from 8 seaters to jumbo jets and were quite pleased. SAA is an international airline and I believe their record is quite good. We landed at Strukuza (sp?) outside Kruger and stayed at the Inyati Lodge which was fabulous; the guides were all natives and exremely knowledgable...all we missed seing was a leopard, saw the other 4 of the big 4 plus everythig else we could have wished for.

I recall that driving was not recommended in the Cape area then, and understand that it is still not recommended.