Erindi Part 2: An elephant breathed on Katie

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Here are some more tales of our times roughing it on safari 😊 The restaurant at the lodge has a large back porch that overlooks a watering home so we spent a lot of time relaxing there and drinking coffee and tea (life is pretty hard) There is a group of about 10-15 hippos who hang out in the watering hole and 2 of them have tiny little babies. Those hippo babies are the cutest thing! Katie was obsessed with them and took about a hundred pictures of them. The hippos sleep standing up with their noses resting on the ground or each other and sometimes the mama hippo would rest her nose on the baby which was also quite adorable.

Every night a herd of elephants including a few babies would come to the watering hole for a drink and a bath. The baby elephants would toddle after their mommies and we loved watching them. Unfortunately we never saw them during the day so we weren't able to get very good pictures of them. After the big herd left a few males would stay around and swim. They would fight every night which was scary and amazing to watch. One night a rhino was in the water getting a drink and one of the elephants walked up to him and challanged him. When the rhino didn't leave the elephant walked and stepped over him so that the rhino was between his front and back legs. This scared the rhino enough that he ran out of the water but apparently not far enough for the elephants because then another elephant pointed his trunk at him as if to say "keep walking" and then the first elephant took a threatening step toward him causing the rhino to run away. Everyone at the lodge was appropriately enthralled by this display.

On one of our evening drives Warren got the call that another group had found some lions so we sped off to join them. Then we found another male lion named Fugitive (because he has jumped the fence and escaped a few times) and his 2 girlfriends. For the second time in a few days we found ourselves a few feet from a very large lion. The male lion was very lazy and kept dozing but those females did not take their eyes off of us. We think that female predators are way scarier than males. It was still amazing to watch them. Later on that same drive we stopped at a small watering hole with beautiful views to get out of the truck and have a drink. While we were standing their enjoying the scenery we noticed something large walking towards us. Once it got closer we could tell that it was a large male rhino and as he continued to walk towards us, our guide identified him as a black rhino, which is endangered and very rare to see! He kept casually walking toward us as our guide explained the usually black rhino will either charge at or run away from people. Since none of us wanted to be charged and we were blocking his path to the watering hole, we got in the truck to move out of his way and continued to watch as he walked within feet of us and casually took a long drink before moseying back in the direction he came.

On our last morning drive we followed the elephant tracks for a while trying to see the baby elephants but weren't having any luck. Just when we were getting ready to give up and head back to the lodge, we happened upon 2 large male elephants munching on thorn bushes. The first one just quietly munched and kind of ignored us but the second one basically brushed up against the back of the truck as he walked by. Then he romped up to the side of the truck that Katie was sitting on and got close enough that if she stuck out her arm she could have touched him. He stood there for a while and Warren just spoke soothingly to him while Katie and I tried to stay as still as possible so as to not piss him off. Then he stuck out his trunk and sniffed Warren and Katie and his trunk was within a foot of her face. Then he just walked away. We definitely had some adrenaline pumping after that encounter.

We also saw a group of wild dogs which are more endangered than black rhinos. They have a rehabilitation/conservation program at Erindi to try to help increase their numbers.

Overall Erindi was an incredibly amazing experience! The environment was beautiful and incredibly peaceful and we couldn't have imagined more incredible encounters with the animals! We are definitely safari fans and hope to go again sometime soon!

On the way home we stopped in Okahandja at another craft market to buy some gifts and souvenirs. This was as stressful as our last craft experience (make sure you come look in my shop, what you don't like what I've made, please support me, you barely looked in my store come back and look again) but we did manage to get some good stuff. Hopefully that will be our last crafting experience here.

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Photos

That's Katie's hat
A bit too close for comfort

Comments

[dad]

katie
next time use mouthwash before u go out w elephants. They're famously offended by bad breath.. xo