On our recent visit to Kruger Park with our friend Rod, we had what we refer to as an elephant experience. As you know if you've visited Kruger, there are long stretches where you see no animals but impala and that gets old quick, so we headed down from the Lower Sabie rest area to Hippo Pool by the Crocodile Bridge. Last time we saw a huge herd of elephants there as well as the unique experience of driving through a herd of over 100 cape buffaloes. This time we were disappointed as nothing was there except a park ranger riding his bike with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Believe me when I say that there a lot of bad jobs in this world, but I think that riding a bike in the midst of elephants, lions, leopards, rhinos, buffaloes and giraffes--all of which can easily kill you, with or without a rifle--has to top the chart of bad jobs. Anyway, we stopped to ask him directions to the animals and he was no help, so off we went to to continue our search.
Instead of heading back the way we came we took another route through the bush and soon Skyler hollered out that he saw an elephant. After stopping in a swirl of dust, I backed up to the spot and sure enough here came a small group of elephants. There were a couple of mothers with their babies as well as a couple of teenagers. I say teenagers because they're not as big and their tusks are still small. We sat there watching these majestic animals tear branches off of trees and eat them. We could see from the mud on them that they had just left the hippo pool and we thanked the Lord for this amazing opportunity to see more of His creation. After a minute or two--they are always moving and coming closer to us--I see some really big ones coming up behind this small pack. Let me just interject at this point that words are not adequate to express what you feel at this moment as you watch these huge creatures move silently through the grass where the only sounds you hear are the breaking of branches as they tear them off to eat. Their ears are moving non-stop to keep them cool and you just sit in amazement.
Well during our gawking time, the first group started crossing in front of us with the babies and we're trying to get pictures and video of this sight. One of the teenagers decides to give us a personal photo shoot as he comes to eat literally less than 10 feet from us.
While we are drooling over this sight, I'm watching the really big ones circle in behind us and I'm beginning to get very nervous. You never want to be between babies and the head matriarch, so I decided it was time for us to move on. When I put the car in gear and began to step on the gas, the teenager jumped, trumpeted and made a mock charge at us. Have you ever seen an elephant jump? I wish I could say that you could see this on our video but the picture is flying all over the place as Susan tries to recover from the fright. Thankfully we were able to move on but my legs still shake at the memory of this experience. And to think that there was a day back before the flood when animals weren't afraid of man!
