Kruger from Hazyview: a guide to Phabeni Gate

One of the pleasures of staying in Hazyview is that a day in Kruger National Park does not require changing hotels, packing a suitcase or losing half a day to travel.

From The Zarafa, Phabeni Gate is 17 km away, around twenty minutes by road. You can leave your villa before sunrise, spend the morning or the full day in the park, and be back beside your private pool before dinner.

Why Phabeni Gate?

Kruger has several entrance gates, and the right one depends largely on where you are staying. For guests in Hazyview, Phabeni is particularly convenient.

The gate gives access to the southern part of Kruger, with routes towards Pretoriuskop and Skukuza and plenty of opportunity to spend an entire day exploring without needing to travel enormous distances.

Kruger is home to approximately 148 mammal species, including elephant, buffalo, lion, leopard, rhino, giraffe, zebra, cheetah and wild dog. As with any genuine wildlife experience, there are no guarantees about what you will see on a particular morning, which is rather the point.

What time should you go?

Early mornings are hard to beat.

SANParks identifies early morning and evening as particularly productive times for game viewing. Park entrance times vary with the season, generally opening earlier in the warmer months and slightly later in winter.

If you are booking a safari through The Zarafa, we arrange the departure around the drive and the season.

And if an early start means missing breakfast at the restaurant, you needn’t go into Kruger hungry. Speak to us the day before and we will make arrangements for you.

Private safari or self-drive?

Both have their advantages.

A self-drive gives you complete independence. You can stop for as long as you like, change your route on a whim and spend twenty minutes watching impala if that is what interests you.

A guided safari removes much of the work.

An experienced guide reads tracks, alarm calls, bird behaviour and the movement of other animals in ways most occasional visitors cannot. They also know the road network well and can concentrate on finding wildlife while you concentrate on looking at it.

For a first visit to Kruger, we generally think a guided drive is worth doing at least once.

A private vehicle adds another advantage: the day can revolve around you rather than around a group.

Half day or full day?

A half-day safari works extremely well if Kruger is one part of a longer Lowveld stay. Leave early, spend around six hours in the park and return to The Zarafa with much of the afternoon still ahead.

A full day is better for somebody who has come primarily for wildlife. More time gives you more routes, more habitats and more chances for an ordinary drive to suddenly become a very good one.

Neither guarantees better sightings. Wildlife remains wildlife.

What should you take?

Dress for the hour you leave, not only for the temperature you expect later.

Winter mornings on an open safari vehicle can be surprisingly cold, while afternoons are often warm. In summer, sun protection matters. Binoculars are worth bringing even if you are mainly interested in mammals: Kruger’s birdlife and smaller animals often provide some of the best moments between the headline sightings.

A hat, sunscreen, binoculars and a camera are sensible additions to a day bag.

Coming back

There is something rather satisfying about spending hours looking for lions and elephants and then, twenty minutes after leaving the park, closing the gate to your own villa.

Have a shower. Get into the pool. Sleep for an hour if the 5am start has caught up with you.

Dinner can wait until the evening.

That is one of the advantages of doing Kruger from Hazyview rather than trying to fit everything into a single safari lodge experience.

See our Kruger safaris All guides