Even if they have been separated for years, elephants will recognize each other after being apart and greet each other with wild trumpets. When this photo was taken, these two elephants had come from separate sides of the waterhole and then embraced.
After a long hot day there is nothing better than a mud bath. It seems to be a teenage elephant expression of rebellion — swinging all that red mud over their bodies, like this handsome young fellow is doing.
Oh yeah, I got kissed by a teenage male elephant — the fellow waving his trunk at me in this picture. I was sitting alone in the hide — the place where you literally “hide” out from the animals — at night, enjoying an Amurula on the rocks (Amarula is a cream liqueur from South Africa made with sugar, cream and the fruit of the African marula tree, which is also named locally the elephant tree or the marriage tree) before retiring to bed, when this family came over to say hello. It took a while for the little one to get comfortable enough to come this close, but he finally reached out his trunk and touched me.
According to Zimbabwe government statistics there are more than 15,000 elephants roaming freely between Hwange National Park and nearby open spaces in Zambia and Botswana.
Sadly, when I visited, more than 100 elephants had been poisoned in the south of the park by poachers seeking to harvest their ivory. This happened despite a presidential decree meant to protect them, which is how Hwange’s Presidential Herd gets its name.
The watering hole at the Ivory Lodge can attract up to 500 elephants at a time, and seeing so many of these regal creatures walking towards it when you first check in is an amazing experience.
At night, from the high comfort of your treehouse, you can expect to hear stomping under foot at Ivory Lodge. If you do, it’s just the elephants busting through the electric fence again in search of tasty fruit trees on the main lodge grounds.
I’ve been tweeting for years, but I’ve never gotten so many retweets as when I posted a photo of an elephant family drinking against a setting sun. This isn’t the exact picture I posted on Twitter — that one was shot on my Blackberry and was much worse quality– but here’s a more high-definition version. Yeah, pachyderms are super photogenic.
When elephants walk right past your safari vehicle, as this one did, it is impossible not to stare at their leathery bodies just feet away. What fascinates me the most is how dry and wrinkly their skin looks up close, and how the ears sometimes have little holes in them, like the elephant got a piercing then lost the earring.
I’ve never gotten so close to elephants as I did with the Presidential Herd. And it wasn’t just an isolated incident that could be considered luck — like seeing a huge pack feet from your car. No, here I saw elephants up close everywhere I looked — while eating dinner in the open-air lodge at night, from the porch of my treehouse, from the hide and in the vehicle on safari. And everywhere I saw these gentle giants, they didn’t seem afraid of me. I’ve been on dozens of safaris in half a dozen countries but I’ve never had an elephant reach out and touch me with his trunk anywhere else in Africa. Yep, I’d say Hwange’s elephants are pretty special.
