In search of Elephants

Well for the last 2 days we have gone bush and I have reacustomised myself with the love of camping (yeah right) in search of elephants. We have been in the Tembe Game Reserve which is right in the top corner of South Africa. The Tembe reserve is home to the largest of Africa's elephants.

We entered the park and were given a pamphlet of what to look out for in an agressive elephant - head shaking, front foot stamping, sniffing the air in your direction - all of which sounded like what elephants do so we threw away the piece of paper and decided to just stay a respectful distance. We stumbled across a beautiful bull elephant happily drinking whilst we took lots of photos.

With a little bit of apprehension we approached our next bull elephant - we were warned by the only other person in the park that an aggressive elephant was on the track. Well he was literally on the track (right in the middle of the road) and there wasn't anything aggressive about him - a young male that was happily throwing sand on himself (and of course the best sand was on the road). We sat and watched him for about half an hour as he continued to come closer and closer to us - happily looking for more sand and something to eat.

It was amazing seeing these beautiful animals in the wild - there are some amazing people doing good work to rehabilitate elephants across the world - if you are interested check out the elephant project in Cambodia, in Laung Prabang in Laos and in Thailand at Chang Mai.

After the elephant park we camped the night at Numbo reserve - well after seeing a rhino right at the start of the park we decided to go for a walk with a ranger and hopefully come across some animals on foot. Well our guide looked the part with a large rifle and shinny bata scout shoes - the animals were nowhere to be seen. After walking for 2 hours through a mosquito infested swamp the best we saw was a ripple from a hippo. That is not to say our guide didn't try - we walked up and back looking for this red crested bird as our guide did bird calls (that was never going to cut it after seeing elephant all day). Well finally our guide gave up and we trudged back to camp only to see more animals at our camp site eating the grass than we did on the entire walk. Just goes to show that they are wild animals.

We are now off to Swaziland to do some whitewater kayaking - I hope this blog finds you well.