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Published: March 8th 2010
After a long drive we made it to Addo Elephant Park. This has been the highlight of the trip so far for me, I an never see too many elephants!
We are staying in the park in a cabin which turned out to be much posher than we were expecting. It has a balcony over looking the park and the surrounding bushes are constantly filled with tweeting birds (#chirp - Tim says this is a joke for those in the know!)
We started off by going on our own game drive, within seconds we'd seen a Buffalo and then several elephants. There are around 400 elephants in the park so we expected to see a few but it was good to see so many, and so close to the road. Game spotting is quite tricky here as most of the park is dense bush. We also saw some Warthogs, so far we'd only seen them on plates with a nice dressing so felt slightly guilty seeing the mummies, daddies and babies running about (still they are very tasty!). We also saw Tortoises, a Secretary Bird and various antelopes including a Red Hartebeast and the everpresent kudu.
As we
were booked on a sundowner game drive we headed home and jumped into a Landrover to go back where we'd just come from. The drive was good fun as we had practically the whole park to ourselves and a guide who could spot and identify animals before you'd even noticed there was anything there (“Kudu, Kudu” when all I could see was a bush!). We saw some flightless dung beetles, endemic to the park, rolling some balls of dung. They have right of way on the roads as they are so rare. Although we didn't see anything we hadn't already seen it was cool zooming along and then enjoying a beer/wine next to some elephants whilst the sun set.
The next day we headed back into the park for another game drive. We saw a herd of around 60 elephants right next to the road, they got a bit too close for comfort practically sticking their trunks into our car at one point! Elephants are very messy! The roads are littered with dung and broken spiky bushes after they pass through an area, they need to learn some manners! After a few hours enjoying the company of warthogs, tortoises
and a jittery Bushbuck we finally exited the park to stay the night at the Happy Jackal Guesthouse in Colchester. We had a huge room with a view of the Sundays river and sat on the pontoon dangling our feet in the surprisingly warm river water.
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Malcolm Parsons
non-member comment
#chirp
#notfunny