Addo Elephant National Park and Zuurberg

Well, this week has been full of exciting adventures. First off, we drove from Plettenberg Bay to a place close to Port Elizabeth/Gqeberha to our hotel called Zuurberg Mountain Village. We chose this location because it is very close to Addo Elephant National Park, the third largest national park in South Africa. I quite enjoyed the hotel because there were lots of adorable cats wandering around and the rooms were very lovely. The only thing that I didn’t really enjoy was their food.  Instead of ordering from a menu there was a buffet. The meat was dry and nothing really had much flavor. Besides the food , and my brothers’ loud snoring, the hotel was very nice. We had two rooms which was great since I had my own bed. 


On the first day, we drove to Addo Elephant National Park to do a self-drive safari. I was happy that we were not in one of the open safari jeeps because it was cold and dusty on the un paved roads through the park. Although our car was relatively low to the ground, we still had a blast. We saw lots of elephants, warthogs, black-backed jackals, mongooses, Cape Buffalo,and herds of zebra. My favorite animals to see were the elephants at the Hapoor waterhole because there were so many of them with their babies and some were even spraying each other with water which was really cool to see. It was a really fun and awesome experience seeing all these wild animals so close by in person and free (especially as the enormous elephants were walking within feet of our car). Overall I would rate our self drive safari a 8.5/10 because although it was super cool I was a bit tired since I had to wake up at 8:00 am. (Usually I like to sleep until 10:00).