Customer Reviews

Safari Guide: South Africa (Globetrotter Travel Pack. Safari Guide South Africa)

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This book provides a very cursory overview of South Africa's 11 largest wildlife parks. Most of the chapters are about 20 pages long and provide some basic information such as the types of animals one would expect to find and a map along with quite a few problems. The many pictures, unfortunately, reduce the text too much. The result of the relatively short chapters is that too much valuable information is missing, esepcially for those planning on using the book to plan their trips to begin with or once actually there. The book, for example, has only 1 map per park. Considering that some of these Parks are gigantic (Kruger for example is 20,000 square kilometers), this is usually not adequate. For the larger parks more detailed maps should also have been included on the various sections of the parks. In addition, information should have been provided on the best times of the year, to see the major animal species at each park. Also, some time lines should have been provided as to how long it would take to see the park or, at the very least, the major sites within the park. In regard to this, many of the chapters do not even provide major sites to visit, nevermind timetables that would enable visitors to see them. For these reasons this reviewer would only recommend this book to those interested in a brief description to each park, not for planning purposes or as use as guides once there.

It is a good read if you want to explore SA in general. But for more focused game viewing (which i expected it to be) it slides off after the 2nd half. Good knowledge though in general.