We were privileged to visit the Tinga Private Game lodges – Narina Lodge and Legends Lodge. In terms of location, the lodges are located in a private concession in the Kruger National Park near to the Skukuza rest camp. There are no fences between the lodges at Tinga, Kruger and the Sabi Sands so the animals move freely across the Sabie River enhancing the game-viewing. The Tinga lodges, Narina and Legends, both have river frontage so they have prime location.
I will have to say though that the difference between the game-viewing at these lodges at Tinga and the lodges in the Sabi Sands private concession is that Tinga will utilise the land surrounding their concession of 5000 hectares, which belongs to the Kruger Park, therefore they will use the tar roads and will have to adhere to the speed limits and generally rules of the Park. So, occasionally you will come across a few self-drive visitors in the park having found an elephant or rhino, for example. This takes away the authenticity of the game-viewing a little bit because it can be crowded. Also, the downside to this too is that should you happen to spot a lion location several hundred meters away, it will not be possible to travel off-road to see it up, close and personal.
An advantage of their location is that you are on the banks of the Sabie river and you will constantly be in contact with this river and the Sand River during your game drives. At this time of the year, it is incredibly dry with no rain and there are many, many animals found along the water sources! We managed to see quite a bit.
Congrats to our game ranger, Quinton, who managed to do a magnificent job at finding the game he could for us. It is difficult to gauge the game-viewing of an area by only doing two game drives, and hence why we encourage our guests to spend at least 2 nights (3 nights would be ideal) to get an overall excellent game-viewing experience – the more game drives you do, the more you will get to see!