Quick Stats
- Length: 1 night in a small cabin, 2 game drives
- Month: December 2022
- Cost: $20 for the cabin and ~$40 per game drive
- Highlights: Elephants, views, zebras, perfect Garden Route Finale
Garden Route Finale
When I was spending a couples of weeks based in Cape Town, a couple of friends and I decided to spend our Thanksgiving break doing the Garden Route. The Garden Route is an area along the southern coast of South Africa. We spent 5 days driving this absolutely drop dead gorgeous coastline, with the last day and night being in Addo Elephant Park. 2 of the 4 of us had never done a safari before, so we were super excited.
Logistics
We booked a 4 person cabin, which ended up being around 20 bucks a person. It was super cute and super simple (lil porch, 4 beds, 1 room, 1 bathroom, 1 terrible spider). Amazing value for money. We booked it directly through the National Park website, which was a horrible user experience, but worked nonetheless.
We drove up around lunch time from Port Elizabeth, checked in, and signed up for a game drive. I do not remember the prices so don’t quote me on this but I wanna say like 35 or 40 USD a person for the sunset drive. It was a 2 hour drive and they gave you really delish snacks.
The Addo Experience
Addo Elephant Park is, surprise surprise, known for its elephants. Because of the landscape, it can’t really support enough of a population for the big cats, so it is mainly adorable prey animals like zebras and antelopes, plus a ton of elephants. It was an absolute delight, the park was gorgeous, it was my first time seeing any of these animals, and the sunset was perfect. We signed up for another game drive in the morning, and then after that we were on our way back to the Port Elizabeth airport! It was such an amazing way to spend the last 24 hours of our road trip.
All that being said, if you’ve been to any of the big parks already, I assume this one would be pretty underwhelming. I think if I went back now I would be unimpressed, but then again I am pretty impressed by most stuff. So if you’ve already seen the Big 5, maybe spend more time on the hikes and things of the Garden Route. And if you’re debating Kruger vs Addo, then it really isn’t a competition at all. But if you’re on the Garden Route and you’ve done limited safaris, then 100% knock yourself out here. I had a blast!!