Elephants

Elephants have to be the most magnificent creatures on earth - ok, so I am biased having been so very fortunate to have been able to share space with the bull elephants in Savuti. (Chobe national park, Botswana) They were so incredibly people tolerant, they were of course totally human dependent for water during the peak of the dry season it has to be said.

I will never forget those days of parking off in the shade of the only tree next to the waterhole - before long, you would be sharing space with any number of the old gentlemen. Their wrinkled hides fascinated me with their network of lines branching this way and that...and the way they reached out with their tails, feeling to see who else was there and the gentle (most of the time) jostling for position....the lifting of the trunk taking in all available information in the scents on the breeze - awesome!

Driving out onto the open expanse of the Savuti marsh, then a sunbaked grassland savannah and seeing nothing moving and then out of the shimmering heat, an elephant striding purposefully with his strong sure gait along a well worn game path.

From the air, flying low in a small cessna, you could clearly see this network of paths and a lone bull in the solitude....