After our friends left, we decided to go to South Africa. We had a really long boring day driving close to the border. We also crossed the Tropic of Capricorn again. But the border was really quick and easy.

We have a wild card that gets us into lots of national parks in South Africa for free, so we decided to do three parks in three days!

On the way to the first park we stopped at a meerkat sanctuary. They had about 5 meerkats, they were really cute, but we learnt that they are really mean to each other. One was missing a leg and they attack other babies. Lots of meerkats get run over because they panic and freeze when they see a car.

The first park was the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. It is in both South Africa and Botswana. But we just stayed in the South African bit.

We camped just outside the park at a lodge. It had a good swimming pool. It also had some tame animals, like an emu and some wildebeest. One night there was a mongoose that came right up to our table! Daddy fed it some lamb, but it didn’t want any chicken sausage!

The next day we spent in the park. It was AMAZING! We saw lots of antelope like oryx, springbok and eland. We saw lots of dead eland too! There were also lots of giraffes, and we even saw some drinking! They had to spread their legs really wide to get their head down to the water hole. We also saw lots of lions. There were 2 big male lions with black manes and 6 female lions. We saw a cheetah and we also saw a wild cat, asleep in a tree. But the best thing we saw was a honey badger. It was patrolling along the road, and we saw it climb a fallen tree and knock bark off. Then we lost sight of it. We also saw a couple of tortoises.

It was a really good day, my favourite was the honey badger.