Where were we? Oh yes, the morning after the night that was supposed to be the hen do but wasn’t, but still we managed to wake up with sore heads in Maun. Phone call re: a shot elephant in the Ndovu camp, which is on the other side of the lagoon from our camp. Mommy elephant dead, two calves orphaned, one of which is apparently only a tiny baby still suckling. What is a true elephant lover to do after receiving such tragic news? Launch a rescue operation, of course. The baby wouldn’t survive for much longer without milk, so we had to act quickly. We made a quick plan: the guys at the camp would catch the baby and bottle feed it with formula milk – they could put the baby in our vegetable garden which was a small but fenced area (only this would require transporting the baby over to our camp on a boat – but this was a minor problem in the plan which we didn’t want to worry about just yet), we would head back the following day and look after it until we’d found a long-term care home for it. The person who reported the dead mother and the orphaned elephants – let’s call him Steve, who’s an old elephant hunter - said he’d hand-reared a baby elephant before and even knew the formula for the milk it would need. All we’d need to do was to get a permission from the Department of Wildlife to catch the baby as otherwise we might to prosecuted for a kidnapping . (And no, we hadn’t forgotten about the bigger calf, but as a three-year-old it should be big enough to survive in the wild and hopefully find the herd again, so it was less of a worry).
Off we went to the Dept of Wildlife to see the Head of God-knows-what and explained the situation and what we were proposing to do (or Anna did, and I enthusiastically nodded, already picturing myself bottle-feeding the baby in our vegetable garden and patting its little trunk, comforting the poor little orphan – aah). The Head of God-knows-what was very understanding, and Anna being a well-connected and respected elephant researcher he agreed to it, on a few conditions: the baby would have to be released into wild once old enough to survive (that was the plan anyway), we would have to find a place that would be willing to rear it before the permission was granted (hmm…), and that we would have to write a letter (you always have to write a letter about everything in Botswana). Obviously time was of essence and we only had hours to save the baby (at some point news came in from “Steve” that the villagers were already lining up to chop up and cook the mother), so off we went to make some phone calls and to write a letter. There is no official place for orphaned elephants in Botswana, so it had to be a private person with the skills and capacity to bring up elephants – easier said than done. The first place Anna tried refused, but the second place, a safari company that do elephant back safaris sounded more promising. Their MD was flying at that moment, so we arranged to meet him at the airport as he landed. The meeting at the airport was followed by another meeting at his office with a vet, and in the end the answer was a maybe. After he’d ordered a chopper to fly to the scene to assess the situation, a new twist to the story took place: the mother was actually still alive, just badly injured. But they decided to go for it: the baby elephant was going to be rescued! The vet managed to get some formula milk organized, and off he went on a plane to complete OROBE. Their plan was to put down the mother, catch the baby and fly it to the elephant back safari camp that very day, before it got dark (I have to say I was slightly disappointed by the fact that my bottle-feeding the baby elephant fantasy would never happen now, but then again I supposes it was more important to actually save the baby in the first place...). We got the letter together and delivered it to the Head of God-knoes-what, and it was all official. Nothing more we could do now, apart from having the hen night and wait until the morning to hear whether everything went to plan.
So the hen night finally took place that night – the hen made it, we made it (just in time), and everyone else had also been able to re-arrange their plans and made it. We dressed Hattie up as a zebra (for she is a zebra researcher marring another zebra researcher), got our blacks and whites on and went on a river cruise for sundowners. A bottle of sambuca was also involved from early on, which probably was one of our not-so-great-ideas.
The cruise was followed by a lovely dinner in a new lodge, which we enjoyed so much we didn’t actually make it anywhere else that night. We’d thought of some games involving traditional African wife-skills, such as carrying a bucket of water on head (bucket of water was substituted with a can of beer) and strapping a baby on back and carrying it around the table as fast as possible. Thankfully we didn’t use a real baby as it got dropped many a time. The next morning Anna found out the fate of Dumbo and the outcome of OROBE. After us running around the whole previous day, letters, permissions, negotiations, phone calls, helicopters, flying a vet to the scene and my shattered dreams of bottle-feeding the little elephant, it didn’t happen. Well, it did, sort of. It was just that the suckling baby and a three-year old calf as reported by the renowned elephant hunter “Steve” turned out to be a two-year and a nine-year old calves – both way too old to be reared by humans not alone flown anywhere, and with fairly good chances of surviving in the wild on their own anyway. The mother was put down and the kids run away to the bush, and that was the end of it. “Steve” was oblivious to the rescue operation and the effort that went into organizing it – we declared him senile there and then.
The rest of our time in Maun was filled with the Maun festival, a two-day affair of live music, stalls and films. It was fun, but by the end of the weekend we were more than ready to head back to the safety of our lovely, peaceful camp. ‘Shattered’ just isn’t strong enough a word to describe how we felt.
We didn’t head straight back however, but stopped to visit the mysterious Tsodilo Hills on our way home. We arrived late at night and camped by the “Female” hill. There was a great thunderstorm not far away from us so we watched the lighting doing its magical light show on the rocky walls, under the thousands of stars.
Tsodilo Hills is a sacred place for the San bushmen, believed to be the place where the first creation took place thousands of years ago. There is evidence of human life on the site from some 10,000 years ago with the oldest rock paintings dating back about 4000 years. 
That’s what we went to see on the following day, as we climbed to the top of the Female Hill and down again. A truly amazing place. Next day, we headed home. It was great to come back. I’d missed the dusty dirt road, the people, the grinning children waving by the road (whether they’re just excited to see a car, white people, or just us, remains a mystery), the little round mud and grass houses in the villages, the goats, the cows, the donkies, the short boat journey to our island, John the camp guard, our little vegetable garden (to think I’d been ready to sacrifice it for the baby elephant!), the snorting hippo (only one still – the rest of the gang haven’t returned after the cruel killing of the young male), everything. That was my home and I loved it: that’s where I was the happiest.
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