The one with more elephants than she can count

After our return from Maun things settled back into the usual routine: six thirty am wake ups, busy days around the Panhandle visiting raided fields and interviewing the farmers, counting elephant footprints on the road, dinners cooked on the campfire, early nights and falling asleep to the sounds of the bush. The week that we’d been away three elephants had been shot in the area, and we had to go and check out the carcasses. It was a sad and a very smelly sight every time. We went to see the mother whose baby we’d tried to rescue, and watched the maggots eating away whatever flesh had been left from the villagers as days went by. A day before the full moon we did a night watch on a road that runs through a major elephant pathway and saw more elephants than I could count. Luckily Anna could count, as that’s the main reason we were there, and got to nearly 300. Finally the number of living elephants I’d seen surpassed the number of dead elephants. I saw lots of breeding herds with babies, adolescents and juveniles lead by a matriarch, lots of male herds and big lone bulls crossing to get to the river. Some of them were crossing quite far and could only be seen with binoculars, others walked past not that far from where our car was parked. One bull crossed just behind the car and headed into a bush where’s I’d gone for a pee only a few minutes earlier. Shame my video camera can’t record video in the moonlight, but I got some great audio recordings anyway.

We attempted a bit of socializing a week after coming back from Maun: Simon hosted a full moon party in the Ndovu camp, but as it was the night after the night watch we were literally asleep by ten and had to head home early.

On the following day (Sunday) we had a very special visitor in our camp. It was the afternoon and I was sitting by the kitchen tent, logging tapes with the headphones on, then decided it was time to light the fire and heat up some water for a shower. I got up and headed to the bushes to get some twigs to get the fire started, when I heard some rustling coming from the bush. At first I thought it was the cows again (they can be a real menace and we’ve had to chase them away from the camp numerous times) but just before I was about to begin my scare-the-cows-routine (which involves running towards them clapping my hands and shouting whatever insults come to mind) I stopped and listened again, for it there was something strange about the noise they were making. It sounded an awful lot like elephants breaking off branches with their trunks and munching them – a sound which I now recognized from doing the night watch. So I decided to wait and observe the situation for a bit, and the more I listened the more I got convinced there was an elephant there. I went to get Graham who was nearby and we tiptoed to the washing line, a closest place we could get safely. He confirmed it was definitely an elephant in there, went to get Anna and his camera and I got my video camera ready. We waited hiding behind the sheets on the washing line and after a few minutes a trunk appeared, then the head of an elephant, then the elephant itself. The young bull then must have got a sniff of us as he turned his head towards us, checked us out, then backtracked to the bush. Shame he didn’t stay long enough to sign the guest book – maybe next time.

Last week we went camping on Wednesday as we were visiting villages far from our home camp. On Thursday we got a call from Graham that another elephant had been shot near were we were. He’d seen people carrying huge bags of blood-dripping meat on the road and there was just too much of it for it to be from a cow. We turned around and drove not really knowing where we were going, until sure enough, we spotted a couple of people who’d loaded up a donkey with fresh meat. A while later we stopped at a compound by the road to ask for directions, and it turned out to be the house of the man who’d shot the elephant. He hopped on to the back and took us to his field, where we witnessed a crowd chopping up the elephant – literally, with their axes, removing any flesh they could. Women, men, children, dogs, everyone going for it. We interviewed the man there and ironically he doesn’t even eat elephant meat (a lot of people don’t due to their religious or other beliefs). I don’t know if Anna will ever forgive me for insisting we go and see it – she said it was one of the hardest things she’s had to do in her life. But it was one of those things I knew I had to film.

On Friday we headed to Namibia as my 60-day visa was about to expire and I had to get it re-stamped. We’d decided to stay across the border for a couple of nights and check out the game reserves there, so we camped in a lovely new lodge called Nunda. The next morning we went to Buffalo game reserve, an old batte field /army base from the civil war and now a forgotten and remote forest on the Caprivi Strip, bordering Botswana. We must have been the only people there that day. We drove around a saw lots of wildlife; different types of antelopes, warthogs, eagles, observed a monkey colony for an hour, had lunch by the river, drove to the border fence to look for evidence of elephants crossing the border (which we saw) and just as we were about to give up for the day we came across a big herd of buffaloes. In the late afternoon we drove to another game reserve and in the first half and hour there saw not just all of the above again but also zebras, giraffes, ostriches – and had some very close encounters with elephants! Here they are obviously not that bothered by people (even though it’s not a busy game reserve by any means, we didn’t come across any other vehicles there either) and one came straight up to our car. Yeah. Elephants are SOOO cool!