Elephants...

2 July 2009 By Wesley Cragg

My guests are into their third day here at Riverbend and we have seen more elephants than we had even hoped to see!! On drive this morning, not even half an hour after heading out, we stopped at a river crossing to see what a troop of vervet monkeys were alarm calling for!! We were discussing the possibility of a caracal that we had just seen crossing the road ahead of us being the cause of all the comotion, but could not see anything in the direction that the monkeys were looking. My guest (Christo Botma) then asked me what was ahead of us on the road... it was a herd of (+ -)50 elephants, including suckling calves, heading straight towards us! What an incredible sight! Every one of the elephants went down into the riverbed below us in search of water and we had the most amazing arial view of them. It was an entirely different feeling being able to view them from that angle. We waited until all the elephants had moved off and continued with a very successful drive.