Today I have a small thematic selection of photos here, and these are not landscapes (surprise!): today's photos are entirely dedicated to the largest of terrestrial animals — elephants. To be more precise, African savanna elephants. And my impressions from the modest, but still existing experience of meeting them :)
We once visited Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa. It is a large popular national park and game reserve that provides its guests with numerous services and offers a great variety of animals to see in their natural habitat (which, by the way, according to the park's website, is fortunately free of malaria).
The park, of course, has a well-developed tourism business, in terms of safaris you can choose packages for 1-5 days with accommodation on the park's territory, but you can also come for a few hours and rely on luck — which of the animals you will see during this time. That's what we did, and although we didn't see all of the Big Five, we were still very pleased.
But let's get back to the elephants, which were one of those animals that I personally really wanted to see in their natural habitat, not in a zoo. For a while at the beginning of the trip we saw them only from afar, on the slope of the hill, then they disappeared from sight altogether. But we moved along the roads, did not lose hope and still waited.
Having seen a small group of elephants not far from the side of the road, we slowed down and waited, not forgetting to vigilantly click the cameras from the windows of our minivan (we drove into the park in our cars, without paying for the services of drivers and special open safari transport). By the way, we were told that it is strictly forbidden to open the car doors and especially to go out onto the road.
We obediently admired these magnificent animals up close, periodically moving forward and back a little along the road. This spectacle is mesmerizing up close — they are so huge!
As Wikipedia tells us, the body length of a savanna elephant reaches 6-7.5 m, the height at the shoulders is 3-3.8 m. The average body weight of females is 3 tons, males - 5 tons. These figures are impressive, and even more impressive to see them right in front of you in real life.
At some point, this herd of elephants decided they needed to cross the road — maybe the grass was tastier on that side? And so they began their leisurely crossing.
Here we were even more delighted - you can look at the elephants from different angles and in more active movement!
However, not everyone was comfortable: one of our two cars was in front, and the elephants were behind it. It was inconvenient to look into the side mirrors and the rear window, so they looked around, opened the doors of their minivan and looked out from there too. It's good that there were no rangers nearby, but overall, I understand them — how can you resist such beauties!
At some point, almost all the elephants huddled on the road and the young ones sometimes even trumpeted with all their trunks, notifying everyone of their warlike mood. A very impressive sight! In general, the adult elephants, it seems to me, tried to shield their family from us, covering us from both sides of the road.
But sometimes young elephants appeared alone on the road in front of us. They seemed to be walking back and forth purely for the pleasure of showing off and looking at us.
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And this is a very small elephant calf, in their joint photo above you can see that he can still easily pass under the adults' bellies, his tusks are not even visible yet. He looks a little lost on the side of the road, but, of course, he was not forgotten there :)
Soon, when all the elephants had safely crossed the road, gathering the young ones into a group, they went about their business, and we continued on ours.
It was an unforgettable experience! We saw a lot of what we wanted in the park, although not everything and not all the animals (for example, we did not meet lions) — but still, in these short 3-4 hours of trip around the park, we received a lot of emotions and impressions. It would be nice to stay here for 2-3-4 days, go on longer safaris, but alas, it is still not possible to do everything in the world - we always have to make a choice of what to see in a limited amount of time :)
It's better to watch all the photos in high resolution.
Camera: OLYMPUS E-M1 Mark II
You can also see my photos in my blog LJ and in my profile on RTraveler. You also can read a short interview with me here.
