Botswana. The Land of the Elephants. Remember how I was excited to see elephants at Etosha National Park? Yeah well by the end of my time in Botswana I was kind of over them. And kind of scared of them…
Up close and personal with Elephants
I’ve always thought elephants are super majestic and beautiful animals, but I’ve also never admired them from more than a safe distance (most notably not outside of a captive setting). Everyone on my trip was super excited to visit Elephant Sands Campsite, including myself, because it gives people the opportunity to get up close and personal with wild elephants!
We arrived at the campsite at around lunch time and after having a quick lunch at the truck we all headed to the bar and pool area to watch the elephants. My friends and I literally spent two hours just sitting there, watching them all (and having plenty of cool drinks, of course!). It was amazing to watch the elephants coming and going, and displaying all kinds of natural behaviours around the waterhole! For example, we saw them bathing in the mud, spraying water out of their trunks and flapping their ginormous ears to keep cool.
But once the sun set, things got a LOT more terrifying.
An Elephant walked into a bar…
After dinner, myself and a couple of other girls decided to go back to the bar for one last cool drink before bed. We imagined it would be just as nice and relaxing as it was earlier in the day, except it would be too dark to see the elephants. However, what we were actually faced with became one of our favourite stories to tell while simultaneously making us all scared of elephants: there was an elephant IN the bar mere meters away from where people were having their dinner!!! This particular elephant had climbed over the barriers of sharp rocks which were meant to keep the elephants out and it was just standing in the middle of the bar area! Obviously since it was dark I didn’t get a picture, so I’ve re-created the scene for you below:
My friends and I honestly just stood at the entrance to the bar, transfixed, as the staff members managed to shoo the elephant back out of the bar.
Elephants are professional tent-destroyers
Meanwhile, the rest of our group had watched as an elephant pulled apart someone else’s tent!!!! This particular group had left food and drink including a bottle of coke in their tent, and while they were gone this elephant pulled apart everything! Apparently it only left after it got the coke bottle in its mouth and it exploded, startling the elephant. And so in the space of about half an hour, our whole entire group became scared of elephants.
To be fair, I think it’s understandable that we were all a bit freaked out. I mean elephants are huge, powerful animals and they have been known to kill people. I made my tent-buddy help me move our tent so we were between the truck and a shrub so the elephants wouldn’t step on us (and also turned the tent so we were facing the truck rather than the “elephant highway”) and we took anything and everything out of the tent that the elephants might have been able to smell. That includes water, deodorant, toothpaste… You name it, we took it out. We already weren’t dumb enough to have food in the tent but we decided we couldn’t be too cautious.
We didn’t envy the people who had upgraded to a guesthouse, as they had to cross two elephant-filled areas to get back to where they were staying, although being in a hut they would probably be safer than us in our flimsy tents. But in the end I managed to sleep the whole way through the night. Which is impressive because the next morning I found elephant footprints RIGHT BEHIND OUR TENT!!
You should definitely go to Elephant Sands
I hope my horror stories haven’t put you off because I would actually recommend staying at Elephant Sands Campsite. If you’ve seen my last post, you’ll remember that Elephant Sands was third in my top five places to see wildlife in Africa. Seeing the elephants was really cool and I got some amazing photos. Also, I suspect the crazy things we saw don’t happen all the time (except maybe the tent-destroying one… People are pretty dumb). We were visiting during a drought so there were a lot more elephants than usual at the waterhole and apparently they were desperate enough to try suck water out of the toilets in the huts. It’s not that much of a stretch to think they might have entered the bar in search of water too!
If you do go to Elephant Sands, just make sure you don’t keep food or water in your tent! There’s also some other trick one of my guides did – I think he burnt elephant poo in the fire and dragged it around our camping area. It sounds gross but apparently it keeps them away so I mean whatever works.