When an Elephant Blocks Your Commute: Living and Working in Kruger National Park

There’s a saying in the bush that no two game drives are ever the same. Apparently, no two commutes to work are either.

Living in Skukuza with my two daughters, Gina (11) and Freya (8), means my mornings start long before the safari vehicles roll out. School lunches, uniforms, finding missing shoes, convincing sleepy children that yes, it is in fact morning, and then the daily drive through the Kruger to Rhino Post Safari Lodge begins.

Most days, I try very hard to be on time. Some days, however, the bush has other plans.

Yesterday was one of those days…

We had an important Teams meeting scheduled with our Australian colleague. Because of the time difference, 08h00 sharp meant 08h00 sharp. HR, operations, marketing, directors ‒ everybody was going to be there. So I did what any determined lodge manager would do: I woke up an hour earlier while it was still dark outside, got the girls ready for school, packed breakfasts, and left home with military precision.

Our assistant manager, Kaiser, was driving, and we were making excellent time. We even managed to pass straight through a leopard sighting without stopping (a sentence that probably only makes sense inside the Kruger). Then came a lion sighting. We respectfully navigated our way through that as well, still perfectly on schedule.

Victory was in sight.

We turned onto the Rhino Post access road. Two kilometres to go.

And there he was.

A magnificent elephant bull in full musth.

For those unfamiliar with elephant behaviour, musth is a period where male elephants experience a massive surge in testosterone, sometimes up to six times higher than normal. You’ll notice dark secretions running down the sides of the face and often urine dribbling down the back legs. During this time, bulls become highly focused, highly emotional, and occasionally highly unreasonable.

This particular gentleman had absolutely no intention of allowing anybody through.

At first, he simply stood in the road staring at us. Then another vehicle joined behind us, and things escalated. The bull began dragging branches into the road, effectively creating his own roadblock. Even if we managed to edge past him, we would have had to stop, climb out, and clear the barricade ourselves ‒ something neither vehicle was especially keen to do with an extremely hormonal elephant nearby.

We waited.

He threw sand at us.

We waited some more.

He threw more sand.

At one point, it genuinely felt like we were negotiating with an angry traffic officer.

After about 15 minutes, Kaiser calmly announced that we would have to take the twin-track through the bush instead. In a 2×4 Toyota Fortuner.

What followed can only be described as an unexpected off-road adventure course involving trees, grass, black cotton soil, sideways sliding, and a surprising amount of airborne vegetation. Hats off to Kaiser, who suddenly transformed from assistant manager into professional safari rally driver. I was deeply impressed (and mildly concerned for the suspension).

Somewhere between dodging branches and bouncing over ruts, I managed to send a message to HR explaining that unfortunately I would not be making the meeting on time because an elephant had effectively closed the road to the lodge.

Only in the Kruger National Park can “delayed by elephant” be considered a perfectly reasonable excuse.

And honestly, as stressful as these moments can be at the time, they are also a reminder of how incredibly privileged we are to live and work in this extraordinary wilderness. Here, nature still has the final say. Sometimes that means breathtaking leopard sightings at sunrise. Sometimes it means a lion in the road. And sometimes it means a very grumpy elephant bull reminding all of us exactly whose road it really is.

The bush always keeps us humble. And it’s never, ever boring.