Elephant Encounter

Sunday midday-ish we left Ukutula and headed for Pilanesburg Game Reserve. We'll be staying two nights at Bakubung Lodge. Again - lovely accommodations! Our hosts have taken very good care of us.

We relaxed for a while, taking in our surroundings, enjoying a few cool beverages, before heading out on our evening game drive, with our ranger Peter.

No matter how many trucks go out, the reserve is large enough to swallow us all up

Rook - this one's for you!

We looked and looked...

... and we saw and saw...

zebras, zebras, zebras, zebras, zebras...

... and mud-covered white rhinos...

... and ostriches and blue wildebeest and a tortoise and many types of buck and tons of other stuff!

A special treat was coming across some lions in the wild. They were quite a distance from the road - good thing we have binoculars and zoom lenses to help us out. It may seem strange to get so excited at seeing them from afar when we had been walking just a few feet behind three of them this morning. But the difference is that here they're in the wild, in their natural environment, not in captivity. A very special sight indeed.

And then there are the elephants we met. First was a solo young male elephant on heat. In this state, elephants are more aggressive. Fortunately he didn't pay too much attention to us, just crossed the road in front of us and was on his way, thoughtfully giving us great photo opportunities.

Next we encountered a large herd of elephant. They had a few young elephants with them, but what caught everyone's attention was one particularly small little guy that Peter told us was only a week or so old.

Do you see the baby baby??

Our last elephant encounter of the day was... well, frankly, quite frightening! We saw a pretty good-sized male elephant in heat off in the distance, walking down the road towards our truck.

Our ranger, Peter, stopped the truck and said, "right now, he's the king of the road." We stayed where we were, watching the elephant get closer and closer to us, stubbornly sticking to the road for his travels. As he got closer, Peter turned the truck around, as did all the other rangers on the road, and he advised all private motorists to turn around and leave the area. I overheard him at one stage identify this particular elephant as Rookie and call him "a naughty boy." The last time I'd heard a someone describe an animal that way was Jumanji at Ukutula - the little devil of a lion cub who sank his teeth into my thigh. This made me rather uneasy about the elephant's continued approach and the fact that Peter had clearly decided our truck would be the last line of defence between the elephant and all other motorists on this road.

The elephant continued on his trek down the road, getting closer and closer. He was showing signs of agitation and aggression as he walked - twisting his trunk, flapping his ears and raising his trunk.

A couple of stubborn (read: stupid) motorists insisted on spending as much time as possible taking photos of this approaching bull elephant instead of turning their cars around and getting out of there as strongly encouraged by our ranger. As a result, we ended up pretty close to the elephant (waiting for a "stubborn" driver to turn his car around and get out of our way) and with ears at full extension he started running towards us.

Peter put the pedal to the metal and we regained some distance quickly. He assured us that we were at a safe distance the entire time, but it didn't stop several people from dropping to the floor and multiple screams from being emitted! Have no doubt about it, an animal of this size would have no trouble rolling our entire truck onto its roof with all 20+ passengers on board.

You'll notice in the photos that Simone was having the time of her life, hoping the elephant would charge us a second time. Clearly this girl has not seen enough YouTube videos of elephants flipping cars in game reserves!

As our drive neared its end, darkness had fallen and the truck's side spotlights came on in search of eye-shine. Right as we neared our lodge we found five giraffes not far from the road, and one was a baby.