Two parks in Mpumalanga. Kruger National Park has 174 tickets and tours to book; Manyeleti Game Reserve has 3 tickets and tours to book. The table and the two notes below put them side by side; the full pages have what to see, the ticket and the timing for each.
Kruger is the one great African park you can visit on your own terms: a public road network, entrance fees paid at the gate, rest camps with self-catering huts and a well-signposted map. The tours sold for it cater to everyone who would rather not drive. From Johannesburg, five hours away, the standard products are three- to five-day safaris that use a tented camp or lodge just outside the park and run game drives in open vehicles; budget versions camp, mid-range ones use lodges near Hazyview, and the upper end uses the private reserves along the western boundary, where vehicles may leave the tracks and drive at night.
Manyeleti is a game reserve on the western boundary of the Kruger National Park in South Africa, sandwiched between two of the most famous and expensive private reserves on the continent, the Sabi Sand to the south and the Timbavati to the north, and sharing with them and with Kruger an unfenced border across which the animals move freely. It offers exactly the same wildlife and the same style of safari as its neighbours, in open vehicles with a ranger and a tracker, driving off-road to follow a leopard or sit with a pride of lions, at prices that are noticeably lower and with far fewer vehicles, because it has only a handful of small lodges and tented camps on its 23,000 hectares. That is its whole attraction, and those who know it tend to keep quiet about it.
