South Africa is the land of abundance when it comes to natural beauty. It's the third most biologically diverse country in the world, which means there's a national park to suit every preference.
One of the world’s first wildlife conservation areas was South Africa’s Kruger National Park (KNP), more than a century old and now host to one million visitors a year. Today it is just one part of a single broad conservation area that spans private and public game parks, and even stretches across national borders into neighbouring Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Another Transfrontier Park is the Kgalagadi in Northern Cape, joining the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park of South Africa with the Gemsbok National Park of Botswana.
South Africa has another 18 national parks devoted to the conservation of its flora and fauna. If you love the great outdoors, bright blue skies and the warm African sun, South Africa's national parks together offer all of Africa in one country. There's everything you could imagine, and then some. Choosing just one park to visit could be difficult…
An hour’s drive from such urban jungles as Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town you can see hundreds of animal species in their natural environments. Best known are the mammals and the best known of those are the famous Big Five: elephant, lion, rhino, leopard and buffalo. Not that giraffe, hippo or whale is small...
Heightened awareness, however, has created an increased appreciation of lesser known animals: a sighting of the rare tsessebe (a relative of the wildebeest) may cause as much excitement as the sight of a lion pride stretched out under a bushveld thorn tree. And while one can hardly miss a nearby elephant, spotting the shy little forest-dwelling suni (Livingstone's antelope) takes sharp eyes and is cause for self-congratulation.
The largest mammal of all, in South Africa and the entire world, is the blue whale, which can grow to 33m in length. But of the eight whale species found in South African waters (including the dramatic black-and-white killer whale), the most frequently seen by humans is the southern right whale. This imposing creature comes into coastal bays to calve, allowing for superb land-based viewing.
South Africa is also a bird watchers’ paradise.
|
