Safari trip report (part 2 and last)

Safari essentially consists of driving around the bush looking to see what we could find (and occasionally being radioed by other cars telling us where animals could be found). During my time at Madikwe, I saw, and got photographs of, elephant and zebra (both on my route into the reserve, before I even started my safari proper), impala, kudu, yellow-billed and grey-billed hornbills, warthog, leopard^*, lions, springbok, spotted thickknee, blue wildebeest (aka brindled gnu), jackal (which are surprisingly cute), kori bustard, giraffe, red-billed oxpecker (a bird which sits on giraffes and other large animals and eats their ectoparasites), ostrich, goshawk, shrike, chameleon, babboons, European roller, grey go-away bird and white-chested snake eagle, plus a few birds I didn't catch the name of. I also saw, but was not able to get a photograph of, an owl, mongoose, rhino and vervet monkey. Slightly to my disappointment, I did not get to see hyaena, and the only buffalo I saw had died a week ago and largely been eaten by leopard.

* At a great distance; I needed to borrow binoculars to see it properly.^† It was sitting on rocks on the side of a hill overlooking the plain, which offered it the twin advantages of a nice warm place to sit in the late afternoon as the rocks had been heated by the sun, and a good view out over the plain in search of dinner. (Later, I encountered other animals lying on the airstrip at night, also because it was nice and warm.)

† But I wasn't too bothered, as I'd already had a close encounter with what turned out to be one of a handful of wild leopard left in Israel in 1992.

Most animals ignored the humans―sometimes too much: When I left, there were zebras on the airstrip. The pilot of my microlight taxied down the runway to drive them off, but by the time he'd got to the bottom, they'd wandered back on. "It's going to be one of those days," he said. When sitting in an open jeep mere yards away from a couple of lions, I'd have been worried had I not I recalled Sir David Attenborough, in The Life of Mammals about ten years ago, saying, in similar circumstances (but at night), "No one knows why lions do not simply go into jeeps and take the occupants out, but they never do."

The exception to this general complacency was the elephants. The elephants in this reserve were Zimbabwean; faced with constant pressure from poachers, they had been translocated in a massive operation to Madikwe about twenty years ago. That's a long time, but an elephant never forgets, and these ones were still aggressive towards humans. In my first encounter with one, the elephant tried to get too close to my jeep. "Uh-uh," Jacques said in no uncertain terms, waggling his finger, and the elephant backed off.

Two days later, however, when he did the same to the elephant cow whose older calf had just run towards us waggling his ears, the elephant did not back off, even when he revved the engine. You have to be stern with elephants, Jacques later said. Back down once and they'll trample all over you in future (figuratively speaking). But he judged having a jeep full of tourists was not the right time for a confrontation, so he began to reverse down the twisty-turny path through the bush we had come along.

The elephant responded by speeding up. Jacques began to reverse faster, and it rapidly became a race for us to accelerate backwards faster than the elephant could speed up―not an insignificant task when you have to look backward to navigate the bends of the track whilst simultaneously keeping an eye on the elephant in front. But Jacques never lost his cool, not even when getting blood drawn after being whipped by the thorn bushes on the side, and losing his cap. I have one photo of the elephant before all this started; once we started reversing, I put my camera down and concentrated on holding on with both hands―I didn't want to risk being thrown out of the jeep immediately before the elephant reached it!

Eventually, the elephant stopped and we reached the point where we had turned off onto that path. "Can we not do that again?" whimpered a woman in the back. Jacques said he'd have to go back the next day to teach the elephant a lesson, to reassert his authority... and to retrieve his cap. And then the elephant started coming towards us again.

This time, at least, we were facing forwards, and on a straight road. The elephant, meanwhile, was still in the bush, so you'd have thought would have been disadvantaged. Not a bit of it―if trees or bushes were in the way, she just charged straight through them. Over the following day, I learned to recognise the damage―broken branches and the like―that signified an elephant had been this way beforehand. It took a surprising amount of time, but we did finally manage to leave the elephant behind.

Later, Jacques told us that a couple of tourists had been killed in the Kruger National Park when an elephant turned their car over. But, he said, that was because you could take private cars into the Kruger. We were in no such danger here, because a jeep is too heavy for an elephant to overturn.

The next day, we went back to retrieve Jacques' cap. When we'd last seen it, it had been lying on the ground. After a bit of searching back and forth, we finally found it hanging up on a thorn bush. It seemed the elephants had picked it up and been playing with it!