Well, the main point is that you can’t. Fly that is. Okay, so that’s not quite true, but you are limited.
Drones are banned in all the National Parks - we knew this was the case for SANParks (the main South African parks authority, who run the most well known parks like Kruger), but it’s also true of other operators like KZN Wildlife. All the parks have notices to this effect at the gates, along with all the other rules and regulations.
However, there are also many small, privately owned wildlife reserves. It’s worth asking at these, as they might well be amenable. We stayed at Falaza, who were more than happy for us to fly from the lawn. It is, however, extremely difficult to see the wildlife, in this case giraffes, that you know are there, on a small screen - obviously, a degree of height is necessary to not be noisy and scare the animals, but that just makes them smaller and harder to spot! Honestly - until we got home and I could use a bigger screen, I’d no idea I’d managed to capture anything!
There would have been other places we could fly (the SA Drone Code is similar to ours, and well-published) but we were plagued by wind.
We travelled through Swaziland as well - regulations there are not clear, and had it not been so windy I would have asked if we could fly, but since the poor Mavic would have ended up back in the UK with the wind there didn’t seem any point!
