The baby Elephants on the road to Savuti

One thing that strikes me when I look back at the trip to Botswana’s is that we almost always had Elephants around us. Often they stayed near the camp during the days eating from the trees and it was more than once that I could watch them eat while taking a shower in camp. You got accustomed to the gentle giants even if the teenagers sometimes tried to show off. Their society is really more or less like ours in many aspects.

One of the best Elephant moments came after we had left Khwai Community Area for Savuti. The temperatures where climbing, it must have been around 40 degrees when we stopped to have something to eat. The landscape was something special and sadly I forgot to take any photos of it. We stood there drinking coffee and eating fruit and biscuits when we look out over the flat savannah. When we looked out onto the brown savannah we could see something moving in the heat. We check and saw that it was an Elephant herd and it was moving in our direction. Still they were far out so we could finish what we drank and ate before we climbed onboard the Landrover to watch the herd’s progress towards our position.

We sat there in the Landcruiser with our eyes fixed at the herd. I started to take some pictures once they came nearer but most of them wasn´t that interesting even if I think this is worth showing.

You can see in this picture what made this so special, the tiny baby Elephant. When I saw the first one I switched to my pocket camera and started to capture the herd’s process on video.

Video: The elephant herd

If you look at the video you´ll see that there are some really tiny babies among them, probably just a couple of days old. You also notice that they are in a hurry and it must have been because of the heat and that they urgently needed to find water. It was a harsh and unforgiving landscape and not a place for such young Elephants. I hope they survived, but our guide told us that nearest water source, the one they seemed to be heading for, was dry. Next water source would be the Khwai River and that would mean another 20km. That is a long way to go for a baby Elephant.