My Favourite Place in the World No. 4 – elephants galore

In the same year we visited my uncle in Zambia, we took a trip into Chobe National Park, in northwest Botswana. We had just been to Kruger Park in South Africa which had given birth to my love of safaris with the beauty and wonder of seeing such exotic animals free in the wilderness.
We went on a small tour through Botswana to the Okavanga Delta in the ricketiest van I have ever had the misfortune to meet and, on the way, we stopped off at Chobe Park which has one of the largest concentrations of game in Africa, in particular elephants – an estimated 50,000 elephants to be exact. We were there in the dry season when the elephants sojourn in Chobe River and the Linyanti River areas and they were everywhere – babies, mothers and fathers. They have this peaceful elegance about them but it mustn’t lull you into a false sense of safety. If their ears go back and their trunks down, then get the hell out of there. If their ears are forward and trunk up, then it’s all bluff, but it’s probably a good plan to leave anyway before they change their mind and get properly mad.

We also saw lions lazing around, completely unaffected by our presence, baboons copulating on the road in front of our van and every kind of hoofed animal trotting among the lions and baboons. The Chobe River wound its way through the terrain as slow and laid back as the animals. They didn’t care at all about us but we sure cared about them and one thousand photographs were taken that day by our small group of weary travellers, shaken to our teeth by the rickety van. And all the other people in other vans meandering about took several more thousand photos. The animals were our bored actors on a vast and dusty but ever so beautiful stage.

This matter of being surrounded by other tourists while in the great wildernesses of the world confuses the hell out of me. Is there nowhere one can go to be truly alone? I will tell you about my adventures camping in the Delta, supposedly alone, another time.