Elephants

Most people seeking some up close and personal wildlife viewing in the area of the world where Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia come together at a single point are there to see African elephants. After all, the area within and around the Chobe National Park in northeast Botswana serves as the habitat for about 25% of the planet's population of these animals. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the global African elephant population is about 470,000. The Botswana Department of Wildlife and Parks claims 120,000 of them live within the vicinity of the Chobe National Park. In late August of this year, I made my own trip to that part of the planet to see what I could find.

Despite the numbers in our favor, which I knew pretty well ahead of setting out for Africa, I was hoping I'd see at least one elephant. Just one. That's all I needed. It was for sure keeping my expectations low so I thought I wouldn't be disappointed, similar to me hoping to see at least one bison in Yellowstone National Park four years ago and at least one alligator when I visited Florida's Everglades National Park last year. In Yellowstone we saw tons and tons of bison, and alligators were all over the place in the Everglades. I really hoped my low expectations bar would be greatly exceeded this time too.

It was. No surprise there. We saw our first elephant crossing the Zambezi on a sunset cruise on our second day on the continent and we couldn't have been more excited. Now, I know these animals are big, bigger in fact than any other land animal today, but it walked through the river as if the current wasn't even there. I wasn't prepared to see that kind of strength in an act so simple as walking. These things are really really powerful.

Our sightings didn't stop there. The next day we were sitting at our lunch table on the houseboat that we called home for the middle two nights of our trip and happened to look towards the bow and saw what to us seemed like an astonishing number of elephants. They stretched as far as our eyes could see. It was like that scene in Jurassic Park when Alan Grant first sees the dinosaurs that have been recreated by the park's scientists. There were herds upon herds of animals. And this was the start of the really good part of our trip.

From our lunchtime look forward to the last morning game drive we took in the Chobe National Park, we saw lots and lots of elephants everywhere. We saw them in the water, in the bush and on the grassy islands that appear in the middle of the Chobe River during the dry months. We saw them from big boats, small boats, trucks, the front porch of our tent at the Elephant Valley Lodge and our dinner table at that same property. We watched them walk, swim, eat, drink, growl at each other, squabble, give themselves dust baths, flap their ears and protect and nurture each other. We learned more about elephants in our six days in Africa just from watching and listening to them than I could have ever imagined.

I like to think that I've seen a lot of elephants in zoos in my life and that I would know a thing or two about them, but there's nothing like sitting on a 15 or so foot boat with the motor killed floating just off shore near a herd of elephants to make you pay attention to detail like you never have before. It's so quiet on the river and these animals are so accepting of our presence (while also being wary of us) so you can get super close and look and listen.

We spent about 20 minutes on our first day on the Chobe River watching a herd eat. They methodically pulled the grass out of the Earth, gently but firmly shook all the soil from the roots and then ate. And repeated. Over and over again. The next day we spent about the same amount of time watching and listening to an enormous group drink from the river just before sunset. All the elephants large and small did the same thing (although the smallest were admittedly learning), slurping water up their trunks and then opening their mouths and squirting the water from their trunks down their throats. It was amazing to hear all that in the calm of the late afternoon.

We got lucky on the timing with our family of drinking elephants. We pulled up just as they made their way to the riverbank and stayed until they retreated into the bush. My use of the word family is not an accident. These elephants arrived and left as a unit following the matriarch as a herd. In fact, every herd of elephants we saw go anywhere traveled as a group. Sometimes there would be a lone male along the riverside seeming to protect the herd's flank (in fact I think that's exactly what it was doing) but for sure all the elephants we saw traveled in families.

And just like families, the dynamic within the herd was fascinating, especially around the watering hole near our last stop in Botswana at dinner under the illumination of a floodlight attached to a tree. We were there two nights and, judging by the distinctive tusks of a couple of the bulls, saw the same animals both nights. They visited our watering hole to drink the fresh water from the underground water line the Lodge had installed and to eat the seed pods of the nearby camel thorn trees which elephants apparently love.

Each night the drama played out the same way. The dominant bull and the babies generally received preferential spots at the water before the male moved on to pinch as many of the seedpods as possible, just picking up one after another and popping them in his mouth. Next up were the female elephants who were allowed to drink under the watchful eye of the bull. Each herd we watched had several younger males and every so often they would receive warning growls from deep in the belly of the bull or if they got really too cheeky they would get a nudge, poke or shove. Some of these seemed like legitimate tests of authority and some challenges were punished. Most of the discipline came not through violence but through what appeared to us to be a self imposed "time out" from the challenger, usually turning his back on the herd and remaining there stationary for a few minutes before turning and re-joining the herd. I could have stayed up all night to watch this sort of show if it weren't for the 5:30 a.m. game drive the next morning.

Finally, since I mentioned zoos earlier in this post, I can't finish my story of Africa without an appeal that surely won't be heeded anytime soon. From the first time we saw a herd of elephants moving deliberately but swiftly over the grassland in Namibia to the moment we watched the final departure of a herd at the watering hole, two things were obvious to me about elephants that will not allow me to ever enjoy seeing these animals in captivity again.

First, it seems to me that it is impossible to capture enough land in a zoo or small park to ever duplicate an elephant's natural environment, let alone a whole herd. Without sitting there and watching, you can't imagine how much territory these animals cover in a short period of time. They need vast tracts of open grassland to move through, not small pens or enclosures of an acre or two or four or slightly more. They need thousands of acres. Like miles and miles and miles of land to walk.

Second, most zoos I have visited have two or maybe three elephants. If you get lucky, perhaps there's a baby. And who doesn't like baby elephants? But a family of elephants this will never be. Elephant herds are complex societies and the individual members each play a role in the herd's dynamic. I can't remember any group of elephants we saw that was smaller than 12 or 15 animals and I can't imagine seeing a couple or three in captivity without feeling sadness for the animals. I wouldn't want to be forcibly removed from my family, why do we continue to do this to these creatures?

I get that zoos have played important roles in allowing people to see different species of animals from all over the world and some have been critically important in protecting species that would otherwise be extinct. But there is absolutely no reason on Earth from what I can see that African elephants need to be confined anywhere in the world. There are thousands of them roaming free in Botswana and that's where they really belong. Only in these open spaces in complex family groups can they really be free. I know it's incredibly selfish for me to write these words since I was lucky enough to travel all the way to Africa to see them in person, but after spending four plus days in and around these creatures I can't imagine them anywhere else. I feel so privileged to have been able to see them and I hope I will again.

Chobe Riverbank Trees

Last month, I took a trip to Africa to see Victoria Falls and the animals I came to love from visiting zoos as a kid in England. OK, so maybe Vic Falls was a detour to someplace that I couldn't miss since I was in the neighborhood; it was mostly about the animals. And I was not disappointed. I got to see a ton of them over the six days we spent in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and Botswana. It changed my perspective on so many things, and not just about the creatures we saw there. I couldn't have been happier with my latest trip of a lifetime.

We saw wildlife last month from hotel room balconies, front porches of tents and decks of houseboats in addition to passing them a few feet away in the streets of Victoria Falls. But the best up close and almost personal game viewing came from either the back of a modified souped up pickup truck (it really was so much more than that…) or a small 12 to 15 foot long boat equipped with an outboard motor and a cooler of water, sodas and plenty of Tafel beer. It was our time in the small boat that was perhaps the most rewarding of the six days we spent on the dark continent. 

We were in a small boat on a river because we spent our third and fourth nights in Africa on one of the Ichobezi Safariboats cruising up and down the Chobe River which defines the border between Namibia and Botswana. One of the perks of staying in the four cabin houseboat is the exclusive use of one of the tender boats tugged behind the big boat which you and your pilot (David, in our case) could take out a couple or three times in a day to get a close up look at elephants, Cape buffalo, crocodiles and whatever else happened to be on the banks of the river. Not hippos though. We kept our distance there.

Our first trips on the tender boat were all about getting to see the largest possible mammals we could find. Get me to some elephants (check), giraffes (check) and hippos (check and run). We had no time or patience for birds (we can see birds at home), baboons (saw them in Victoria Falls) or anything else. Get us to the good stuff. And David did. We spent some incredible time watching families of elephants graze and some nervous seconds fleeing from a chasing adult male hippopotamus. 

The time we spent on the small boat was so precious and such a luxury. And thankfully we got a lot of it. After our first two hours on day one, we spent over six hours on three separate excursions the next day in addition to a quick journey the day we left the houseboat behind. We were lucky to spend so much time right on the surface of the water and close to the riverbank that we started to appreciate more than just the large mammals and reptiles that we traveled for longer than a day to reach.

By the third tender boat trip on day two, we wanted to find kingfishers in the reeds near the water's edge and African jacanas (or Jesus birds) walking on the lily pads that floated near the shore. We also sought out monitor lizards and vervet monkeys and kudu and puku and spoonbills and vultures. And in that time, I started to look at other living things on the riverbanks like the trees. And I realized that the trees there are absolutely incredible.

A family of kudu and a couple of baboons by the edge of the Chobe River.

We visited southern Africa in the fourth month of five straight without rain. The water we traveled on was therefore really low; so low in fact that a lot of the land we cruised by and watched wildlife standing on would be covered by water during the height of the rainy season. And not just by a bit. the water level in the Chobe River was a good six feet lower when we were there than it would be a few months later.

The banks of the Chobe are made up of a thin layer of soil covering a base layer of hard basalt rock and the trees that grow there use the soil and the water in the soil to grow large. When fully grown, the trees there are 50 feet or more high and provide shelter and habitat for the animals that live on and drink by the shore of the river. But each time the river rises, it washes away some of the soil that covers the layer of rock that is invisible beneath the bank of the river and it takes away what is sustaining these ancient trees on the edge of the river. 

Eventually, the trees nearest the bank of the river are stripped of what gave them their existence, their roots are fully exposed and they are left clinging to the basalt underlayment for dear life. When you cruise by the trees on the shore you can see their desperate struggle to stay upright. They are literally grasping at everything they can hold onto. Eventually, the beautiful scene of these decades old majestic trees is going to come to a tragic end. They collapse and end up providing a new habitat for monkeys and reptiles at the river's edge. Ultimately nothing in Africa is wasted. I found these trees just fantastic to look at. I hope someone reading this post will also and maybe appreciate them on a trip of their own in the future.

This tree eventually lost its battle to survive...

and provided a sunning spot for a Nile crocodile.

Nine Days, 15 Passport Stamps

Giraffe at sunset in the Chobe National Park.

Last month I spent six nights in southern Africa. When I told people this before setting out on this trip, the most frequent question I got was something to the effect of "you are going all that way for just six nights?" Yes, I am. Or did. Six. That's right. Just six. It was not a decision I entered into lightly but I think it worked well for us as a first trip to the real dark continent (Morocco last year doesn't count!). We got out of it what we intended to get and we got a whole series of great stories from and insight into all of the places we visited.

Despite the short duration, we managed to pass through immigration in five different countries, in addition to stopping in a sixth to re-fuel. Six nights, six countries? Well sort of. Sounds like a lot, right? It really wasn't. The point of this post is to discuss our thought process in selecting this vacation; how we did it; how in many ways what we did is exactly what other folks from the rest of the world are doing; and to pass along some of the insight we gained about taking this sort of a trip and visiting the places we visited. Oh…and why it worked out pretty much perfectly.

I have to tell you this holiday had the potential of being a real sort of freak me out vacation. I've spent a lot of time over the past 25 years or so traveling the United States and Europe and I am very comfortable piecing together a week or more in a sort of a la carte fashion: booking all my hotels, flights and transportation separately to customize the trip to my tastes and how much I want to spend exactly. I'm really comfortable doing this, even with last year's trip to Morocco. But deep in the heart of Africa? Not so much. I needed a different solution.

Now being a big brand guy, I turned to an airline, specifically South African Airways Vacations, to solve my problem. With no travel agents who specialized in Africa in my knowledge base, I figured why not go with a recognizable brand name. Plus SAA Vacations seemed to have a ton of different packaged options for us to choose from in all sorts of different lengths and all kinds of different price points, although none was especially cheap. But if cheap vacations are your thing, maybe safari in Africa is not up your alley unless you really know what you are doing.

Four countries meeting at a single point.

So with the "who" out of the way, now it was time to determine the "where" and that took some doing. Our original strategy was to maximize the number of nights on the continent at the cheapest possible price while getting some safari experience in. We looked at a nine or so night package to South Africa that would allow us to see animals in a private reserve or National Park (both fenced as we learned on this trip in that country) in addition to seeing penguins off the south tip of Africa; touring some historical sights; and spend time South African wine tasting for a day. We also checked out a rhino focused vacation in Namibia (as I recall) and some other options.

Ultimately, we decided this trip was not about wine or history or penguins. It was about safari; seeing elephants and lions and giraffes and all sorts of other creatures that filled my imagination as a kid. So instead of two days out of nine on safari, we decided to maximize our wildlife viewing potential while also allowing a day or so at the famous Victoria Falls. We picked the Chobe and the Falls package, which seemed to get us what we wanted the most. While we didn't know it at the time, these packages are totally customizable. We ended up not doing that but SAA Vacations will allow you to do whatever you want.

Six days, four on safari. The vacation we chose would require us to spend time in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Botswana again while passing through South Africa both coming and going and detouring into Zambia if we felt like it (we did). That sounded like a lot of travel but we'd sure get a lot of passport stamps, which is always attractive to me. But the lot of travel? Turned out to be not so much. Despite all the visits to various exotic countries, the three places we stayed at were about an hour and a half drive to get to all three. If I told you I was visiting Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado in six days, you wouldn't think twice. Same story here. Just like those four states come together at the four corners, the part of the world we visited last month joins four countries at one point.

And as we found out from other folks we met over there, moving around after a couple or three nights is not unusual. The experiences can vary drastically from one place to the next, just like it did for us. And the distance we traveled compared to some of the people we met seemed very very small.

Warthogs digging for food on the banks of the Chobe River.

So at this point we have someone to arrange things for us, we know what we want to see, now we just needed the "when". Now if we were just going to see animals in their natural environment, the best time to go would be simple: when there was as little water as possible, which would bring every creature in the bush down to the river to drink every day, including those creatures that wanted to eat other thirsty animals (it's the circle of life, folks…).

But the dry season, which runs from May to September, isn't such a good time to see the Falls in all their majesty. And when I say "dry", I mean DRY. Like no rain at all for those five months. The river rises six feet or more during rainy season (summer) over the dry season (winter). So we tried to strike a balance, visiting sort of halfway through the winter and hoping that the Falls would be busy enough to allow us to get a full picture of what they might be like in summer. It almost worked because I have a good imagination. But that's a story for another post.

We booked this trip last October and waited ten months before we could get what we paid for. So we went to bed the night of August 19 knowing the next day would be one of the roughest travel days of our lives. Here's how the whole thing went down, with some of what I found remarkable and some pictures thrown in for good measure. Plus where we got all our passport stamps from.

Marabou storks standing in a tree.

Days 1 and 2

Out of the United States (zero stamps); into and out of South Africa (one stamp); into Zimbabwe (one stamp)

At 4:15 a.m. on Thursday, August 20, we hopped into a taxi at the Westin Hotel outside my condo building in Arlington, Virginia. One cab ride, 28 hours and three flights later, we arrived in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, having passed through New York's Kennedy airport and Johannesburg, South Africa. It's by far the longest I have traveled in terms of distance and time to get to any one place in my life. And the Victoria Falls airport is the smallest I have ever been to. Or at least it was for the next week or so.

Before stepping off the plane at Vic Falls airport and walking myself into immigration, my impression of the town of Victoria Falls from looking at Google Maps was that it was probably a smaller sort of Key West. I have no idea why I thought this other than I imagined it was a resort sort of town with a series of restaurants and bars arrayed around a few hotels.

I must have been absolutely bonkers. My impression of course couldn't have been more unfounded in reality. First of all, Zimbabwe is absolutely nothing like southern Florida and it likely never will be. Sure there are chickens roaming the streets of Key West and there are warthogs, elephants, baboons and all sorts of other creatures roaming the streets of Vic Falls but the similarities stop just about there. Other than the fact that there are some quite luxurious hotels in Victoria Falls to serve the tourists who flock to see the famous waterfall, the town is developing, impoverished in many places and surrounded by the African bush, which in mid-August makes it resemble more of a desert than anything thriving.

Baboons running across the lawn at the Victoria Falls Hotel.

Despite what might seem like complaining in the previous paragraph, Victoria Falls was the perfect place to start our trip. It got us a good look at the famous Falls and allowed us a preview of some of the animals we would see later in the week. In a sense it got us really excited about wildlife viewing by almost bumping into warthogs, baboons and hornbills in the streets and trees around our hotel. If we had seen this little wildlife at the end of our trip, we might have just yawned. The preview was perfect.

We tend to be super prepared before we visit other countries in the world. So we were very ready to have people following us around asking us to buy whatever they had in their hands to sell, whether it be carved animals, wooden dishes or a few trillion Zimbabwean dollars (one American dollar is now worth 35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars; that's a 35 with fifteen zeroes after it and yes, I did have to google that). But what we weren't prepared for was how consumer goods starved the people in Zimbabwe are. It's like the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, or so I imagine.

When we declined most offers to exchange our American dollars (now the official currency of Zimbabwe) for whatever the people following us really wanted us to have, the requests changed from money to t-shirts, shorts, shoes, socks or even shampoo. I wish we had known all this for a couple of reasons. First, we could have taken some things over that we no longer needed and just given it away. We managed to scrounge all the shampoo from the hotel (sorry, Ilala Lodge), a couple of old t-shirts and socks we had with us along with some trail mix we had brought to snack on and hand it over to someone waiting outside our hotel.

Secondly, our goods are actual currency over there. We traded in a bandana for a couple of pieces of jewelry and two shirts for a wooden giraffe. The quality of shirts we can get in the United States is just far superior to what you can get in sub-Saharan Africa, even if most of our stuff is made in sweatshops in southeast Asia. We bought some souvenirs from one shopkeeper over there who was wearing the absolute worst NBA jersey knockoff I have ever seen (Toronto Raptors, in case you were wondering). The NBA logo wasn't even close to resembling the actual NBA logo. I could have hooked that guy up with a Wizards jersey from my closet; he'd instantly look more credible and more stylish at the same time. Missed opportunity. I wish Lonely Planet had that in their Southern Africa guidebook.

Crocodiles. The Nile crocodile is one of the most gorgeous creatures we saw in Africa.

Day 3

Out of Zimbabwe (one stamp); into and out of Zambia (two stamps); into Zimbabwe (one stamp)

Considering how juiced we were about getting as many passport stamps as possible, we couldn't be a river gorge away from Zambia and not visit. We had prepared for this at the Victoria Falls airport by purchasing a double entry visa (allowing you to enter Zimbabwe, leave and re-enter) for $50 rather than the single entry visa for $10 less.

Zambia was almost a total waste of time. Almost. And it was all our fault. But more on that later. I feel a Zambian post coming on. At least we got four more passport stamps out of it.

For those of you looking to get a good look at Victoria Falls from the Zambian side of the border in mid to late August, don't bother. It won't work. There's barely any water. Stick to the Zimbabwean side. Walk over the bridge maybe but be prepared to be pursued the whole distance.

My first baobab tree!!!!

Days 4 and 5

Out of Zimbabwe (one stamp); into and out of Botswana (two stamps); into Namibia (two stamps)

I almost feel guilty coloring in Namibia on my countries visited map on the "The Maps" page of this blog. I spent maybe 20 minutes on the actual soil of that country: about ten minutes to get into the country through immigration and about ten more minutes to get out. The rest of the time we were in country was on a houseboat. However, all the time we were on the boat we were technically in the country of Namibia. So there! Plus…five passport stamps in one day. How cool is that?

Staying on the Ichobezi Safariboats was amazing. You book one of four cabins on the main boat (we got the front cabin and only one with a private-ish balcony) and are then provided with your own personal tender boat plus pilot for game viewing excursions. The kind of personal attention we received on board was incredible. Everything we needed, including getting all too close to some very dangerous looking pods of hippos under the watch of our pilot, David, was provided for us. Of all the places I stayed in Africa, I liked the houseboat the best, even if you did have to shower in filtered (but still green-brown) Chobe River water.

The Ichobezi Safariboat: the main houseboat...

…and the tender boat. We stuck to the one on the left.

Two other stories are worth telling about our time in Namibia. We were picked up at the Botswana border by David and his tender boat and immediately taken to immigration on Impalila Island in Namibia. David needed to stay with the boat and our luggage so he gave us directions to the immigration office: walk up the beach and turn left at the baobab tree. Seriously??? A baobab tree??? How awesome is that. I've wanted to see one of these upside down trees since I first read Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince and to a much much much lesser extent first purchased "Pink Floyd"'s Delicate Sound of Thunder album which features a picture of baobabs on the rear cover.

Seeing one of these trees with their super thick trunks topped with their teeny tiny root like branches was a signature African moment for me. There are nine species of baobabs in the world and they only grow naturally in Africa and Australia, although I didn't realize the Australian connection until I got back from my holiday. Seeing a baobab was so totally off my radar that finding one as a marker to turn left to immigration was a real treat. Now I feel a little closer to Le Petit Prince. Oh and "Pink Floyd" is in quotes because Floyd without Roger Waters isn't really Pink Floyd.

The second story worth noting about our trip into Namibia is how well oiled the tourism machine in Africa is and, quite frankly, why I would still be reluctant to engage in travel arrangements myself. When we got ready to depart our hotel in Victoria Falls, the only thing we knew was that we had to be at the front desk at 11:15 a.m., which of course being most always on time, we were. We boarded the minivan that showed up in front of our lodge and then went to pick up some other folks at some other hotels. From there we drove (or rode, I guess) about an hour or so to the Zimbabwe border where we were taken through immigration by our driver and then walked to the fence separating that country from Botswana.

Not everyone from our minivan was headed to the same place so naturally there were a number of different Botswanans waiting for our party on the other side of the chain link fence that divided the two countries. Some of us were handed off to one driver; others to a second but in all cases our names were on the manifest of sorts that these guys had in their hands and our Zimbabwe driver wouldn't leave until everyone was handed off correctly. So we hopped in another minivan and kept going through our new country. We let a group off at a lodge in country and then headed to immigration out of Botswana at Kasane, which ended up being little more than a small building near a beach. Once again there was someone waiting for us and we were handed off securely.

Booking a package tour had really allowed me to not think about the logistics of traveling out of one country, through a second and into a third in the span of less than an hour. But if I had to think about it and worry, I didn't have to. As it turned out, we knew far less than the people that were responsible for getting us safely from point A to point B. And I guess that's the whole point of it, right? It all worked so beautifully that I didn't really have to think about it at all.

Cape buffalo. Male in the foreground, the remainder of the breeding herd behind.

Days 6 and 7

Out of Namibia (one stamp); into Botswana (one stamp)

Namibia was a perfect second stop on our six day trip. After the wildlife preview we got in Victoria Falls, there was seemingly every variety of animal everywhere on the banks of the Chobe National Park and we drank it all in greedily either from the deck of our houseboat or from the water level view of our tender boat while avoiding hippos on the Chobe River. We couldn't have imagined it getting any better.

But it did. The only thing on this trip that topped watching game from the water was watching everything we already saw and much much more from on land. If we had started with a land stop, we would have been disappointed with the rest of the trip, especially Victoria Falls. The sequence provided to us by South African Airways just built the excitement every day. We made a list of new creatures we had seen every day. We added at least three new species to our list every day except the last half day. The result in reverse would have been a lot of stuff up front and nothing new on the back end.

Tent number 14 at the Elephant Valley Lodge. Home sweet home for two days.

I already mentioned my favorite place to stay on this trip was the Ichobezi Safariboats; I just don't think you can beat the attention and care we received while staying there. There's not a whole lot more personal you can get than a place with four cabins and an equal number or more of people there looking after you. It even overcomes a river water shower. But a close second was the Elephant Valley Lodge, our base for our last two nights on the continent.

Elephant Valley Lodge sits right on the Botswana - Zimbabwe border and is made up of 20 tents where us tourists sleep and a central lodge facility that houses reception and is there to feed us three meals a day. I know this sounds sad but this is the first time I have ever slept in a tent that I can remember. And by tent, I don't really mean tent like something temporary set up for the night. I really mean a 12 foot high or so fabric and wood structure that looks like a tent but actually has a full plumbed bathroom complete with shower.

The best part of the whole experience was that most of the property was laid out to focus on a watering hole just outside the fence designed to keep elephants out of our camp. The dining area and tents 13 through 20 face the watering hole which is frequented by all manner of wild animals. We watched a herd or two of elephants slurping water, jockeying for dominant positions and sometimes getting a little upset with one another every night at dinner. We also got up and looked out the front door of our tent every opportunity we got, whether that was first thing in the morning to see the sunrise, in the middle of the day to watch a single elephant about 30 feet from our porch or in the middle of the night on a bathroom run. Hey, you never know when you are going to see a giraffe or hyena or something else out there.

Impala by the water.

We thought we knew what to expect before we got to Elephant Valley Lodge. But our expectations were shaken up a bit by talking with another couple earlier in the week who stayed in a non-fenced camp where all the tents were on stilts and you required an escort to move anywhere within the lodge so you wouldn't get stomped or attacked by something really dangerous. We hadn't counted on this sort of experience. And it threw me a bit.

So we were relieved when we arrived at the Lodge to be told that the camp was surrounded by an electric fence to ensure the elephants that were all around us didn't wander among our tents and possibly trample us in the middle of the night. But the statement about the fence keeping the elephants out was quite a precise one. The fence did keep elephants out but there was a section of fence where the bottom five feet or so was just wide open and we watched a bushbuck (a deer type thing) walk out of the camp shortly after we got there.

Now if a bushbuck can walk in and out of the camp, can't a hyena? Or a leopard? Or a whole pride of lions? The answer as it turned out was yes, but they won't. But just in case, there's a flashlight in the room and a whistle if there's ever any trouble. OK, so nothing happened but if there's a whistle in case of trouble, doesn't that mean trouble might exist? A bit unnerving at first but the folks in the Lodge made sure we were safe. Or maybe nothing tried to get in while we were there.

As great as the Lodge was, we didn't spend a whole lot of time there. Most of our time was spent being away looking at animals on land or in the water. That's the point after all, right? And that's a story for another time.

Lions playing in the bush. It's amazing how well they blend in with the grass.

Days 8 and 9

Out of Botswana (one stamp); into and out of South Africa (one stamp); into the United States (zero stamps)

Time to go home and get our last passport stamps.

I like to think I don't complain about much in life (it's the English person in me I guess; stiff upper lip and all that). But the flight from Johannesburg back to Dulles Airport is a killer. We started day eight with an early morning game drive followed by breakfast and then a ride to the Kasane airport down a dirt road that actually took us around the airfield. I now think Kasane is the smallest airport I've ever been to. They seem to have all of one gate, which is really just a door leading to the tarmac.

From Kasane, we flew back to Johannesburg where we caught a 6:30 flight to Dulles via Senegal. An 18 hour scheduled flight with one stop, from 6:30 p.m. South Africa time to 6:25 a.m. Washington (or Virginia) time. What kills is the stop in Senegal for refueling and to pick up and drop off some passengers. The stop is about 2 a.m. but they can't land a dark plane full of sleeping people. Instead, you all have to wake up, the lights have to be on in the cabin and all window shutters have to be up. So it's 2 o'clock in the morning, I'm dead tired in a fully lit airplane going through cleaning, security checks and boarding. Brutal. I'm not sure I've ever felt more tired in my life. Never want to do that again, even if it is the only way to get back from South Africa to home on a single plane.

On the other hand, arriving at Dulles at 6 a.m. and passing through immigration was one of the most surprisingly pleasant experiences of my life. I never thought I'd write "immigration" and "pleasant" in the same sentence but there was literally no line. Unfortunately, there were also no passport stamps for coming back home. Stupid fast pass immigration...

So that's it. There are many ways to get to southern Africa. We chose South African Airways Vacations and it worked out just fantastic for us. I'm sure there are other ways which are just as good. If you go, I think the package we picked was well worth the price. We learned so much in the short time we were over there. This trip really changed my perspective on a number of things about our world. I hope the thought process we went through helps and use it or discard it as you see fit. But take something American to trade if you ever go to Victoria Falls. It will benefit everyone. And if you see a guy named Eric with a red bandana, say hi for me.

Elephant at Elephant Valley Lodge. Taken from the front porch of Tent number 14.

Beware The Hippos!

One week ago today, I traveled out of Zimbabwe, through Botswana for about 30 minutes and into Namibia, where I would be spending the next two nights on one of the Ichobezi Safariboats on the Chobe River in southern Africa. After a few hours cruising upriver on the big houseboat and a couple of hours in a three-person tender boat (each cabin on the boat got exclusive use of a smaller or tender boat for wildlife viewing) getting a closer look at some of the animals I had come to the dark continent to see, it was time to relax a bit before dinner. And right at that time, I could think of no better place to sit, watch and listen than on the Chobe, which separates Namibia to the north from Botswana to the south.

Our boat and hotel in one was anchored to a small sand and grass island in the middle of the river, technically on Namibian soil, and we were feeling very much alone in the middle of nowhere, probably because that's exactly what we were. The four crew members who were taking care of us were conspicuously out of sight preparing dinner for us and the other three cabins on the boat were empty for the first night of our stay. It was just what I could have wished for on this vacation. Utter isolation. It wouldn't feel quite like this any other night of our trip.

At about 7:15 p.m., just 45 minutes or so after sunset, there was no trace whatsoever of sunlight which added to the feeling of remoteness. It was an amazing scene. There were more stars visible that night than I can recall seeing in a long time, highlighted by the Southern Cross, which is a sight I had never witnessed in my life. Despite the darkness, the brightly lit half moon allowed us to see shapes and masses in the night. Or at least I think it did. The darkness played tricks on our eyes but we believe we could make out dark things moving and bobbing in the river. And the dark things we think we saw were very large.

If our eyes weren't much good to us that night, our ears took in way more. Over an inconsistent background noise of a few unknown bird calls every now and then, there were other sounds in the night that had our imaginations running wild. Most frequent among these noises were minor to fairly serious splashes and the sound of breathing out so heavy that it kicked up water from the surface of the river, not unlike a whale surfacing and exhaling before diving again. But the more sinister sounds were what had our minds racing: low growls reminiscent of a bear and loud grunts that can only be described as a tenor pig (heavy on the bass) with an ape's intonation (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh). The noises were coming from hippos in the water, which happened to be the same very large dark things we think we could make out in the night.

Of all the animals I hoped I would see in the wild in Africa, I was most looking forward to getting a closer look at some hippos. I'm fascinated by the large African mammals in general but the hippopotamus, which is so ungainly looking on land and so deceptively fast in the water, is my favorite. After dinner that first night on the boat, we retreated again to the rear deck of the houseboat to continue staring almost uselessly into the dark while listening to these beasts, hoping they might come ashore so we could see them better in the light emanating from our anchored ship. At about 9 p.m. we believe one did get out of the water and onto our island followed by a second but it appeared to us that the first chased the second right back into the river and things got quieter from there on. We went to bed, hoping that in the morning we'd get up and see four or five hippos grazing before us in the early morning light. We were disappointed. But not for long.

Hippo heads on the Zambezi River.

I came to Africa knowing that the most dangerous animal on the continent for humans is the hippo. These things kill more people each year than any other creature. More than lions, leopards, cheetahs and some of the other predators that you find on the continent by far. Some of this is based on human ignorance. Big cats are quick; have big teeth and claws; and are scary; hippos look happy, fat and slow; eat grass; and can be rationalized as decidedly unscary. But the hippopotamus in the water is a very dangerous animal and it's here where they do their damage. They are very territorial and will chase and attack boats, sometimes biting with their tusk like canines and sometimes capsizing the vessels. And if you don't expect that, I imagine it would be very easy to get killed by one of these things.

With that knowledge, the idea of cruising about a river in a tiny tiny boat with some hippos at large was a bit unnerving. My imaginings had us and a pilot swerving about on a very narrow waterway avoiding the piles and piles of hippos that were popping up all around our extremely fragile vessel. My only solace was that people do this all the time and you don't hear a lot of stories about hippos killing tourists. Maybe our guides would know what they were doing. The river, as it turned out, was a lot bigger than I expected. That helped a lot.

Maybe I scared myself to death before even getting on the water, but my first couple of encounters with hippos in the wild were very different than my preconceived notion that these things were menaces. On our last night in Zimbabwe, we had seen our first pods of hippos from the deck of a 35 foot long, 12 section hull boat on the Zambezi River. While we were told at the beginning of our cruise that the hull design would allow us to survive a hippo attack without sinking, it almost seemed like that warning was a joke. All the hippos we saw that evening stayed far from the boat and didn't show the slightest interest in having anything to do with us.

Our second hippo encounter was similarly uneventful. We had spotted a lone animal grazing on the north bank of the Chobe from our houseboat while motoring upriver and made a beeline for the thing when we launched on our first tender boat ride. Instead of seeming threatening, the hippo simply slid gently into the water, submerged and was gone before we could get close enough for a good picture. No aggression. No attack. No nothing. Maybe these things weren't that frightening and fierce after all.

Hippos near the shore of the Chobe River; the big one looking at you is NOT a good sign.

But by the end of that first tender boat ride the night we were alone on deck, I could very firmly believe that I would never want to get super close to an adult male hippo on the water in a very small boat. Because I had. And it didn't feel good.

First, they made our pilot visibly nervous. Don't get me wrong here, I believe we were never in real danger with David driving our boat, but he didn't like hippos at all. Our boat rides with David allowed us to get super close to elephants, Cape buffalo, crocodiles and all sorts of other creatures and to maximize the experience with these animals we cut the engine when near the shore I guess to allow us to hear the creatures and make them feel more secure. We were checking out a crocodile from about three feet away that first day when we heard a grunt from the water behind us. Before I could turn around and ask David "was that a hippo?" he had already started the engine and was backing up to move on. We never cut the engine around hippos. Never.

Second, we got charged by one as we were heading back to the big boat that night which made the sounds we would hear later so much more threatening. Most of the hippo groups we encountered behaved exactly the same way. During the day, they generally stick close to the shore in a family group: one adult male, a couple of females and maybe a younger calf or two. The male keeps the territory safe and the females keep the babies safe. So if you are cruising by in a boat, you get watched by a very concerned male hippo.

While he's watching you, he may grunt, snort and show you how big he is by raising his body and head out of the water. If that's not enough to scare you away, (and let's face it, we were there to see these things, not run from them) they will charge. And when they charge, they dive so you can't see them for a couple of seconds and they are fast. Like really fast. If you ever want to experience the full force of nature, sit in a small boat with a 3,000 pound plus male hippo rushing at you. I guarantee you won't want to stick around and see what happens. These things are powerful and scary and we fled. Later that week, I'd sit in an open vehicle about ten feet from a lion in the wild and wouldn't be as concerned as seeing a hippo chasing after our boat. Not even close. And that's still super weird to me.

Despite that harrowing experience, we were out the next morning in the small boat again and again we couldn't keep our distance from these things. So that meant more chasing, one similar to the night before where a single male shooed us away with a threat of violence and another where the group of five hippos spread out across the river and kept coming even as we tried to run and stop to look at other animals. I don't think it's paranoia when I suggest that those hippos were determined to chase us until we got far enough away to be tolerable to them. Eventually we did and we got a look at some other things.

A crash of hippos abandoning the shore for the safer waters.

As if all that hippos charging wasn't enough to make me never want to get in a small boat around these things ever again, our last tender boat ride sealed the deal for me in what I now refer to as the first of three "scare the tourists" moments that we had in Africa. Although in reality all of these occurrences were absolutely real and could have been really really scary.

It was early morning after our last night on the houseboat and we were determined to get another small boat ride in to get one last look at things from the river. Our focus that morning was on the shore, looking for leopards (that we never saw) and other creatures that were out just after sunrise. Things were especially slow that morning so not finding anything upriver we decided to pass by the houseboat and check out what was out early in the morning downriver. We had just passed the boat when we stopped dead in the water.

After five trips with David, we generally understood this type of abrupt stop to mean there was something close by worth looking at. But this stop was in the middle of the river where there was never anything interesting to see. We looked back and watched as David struggled to re-start the engine, fiddling with the levers (yes, that's a technical term) and tapping the gas can in a way that it looked like he was trying to coax fuel to magically appear and take us onward. And then we heard the hippo grunt. And while it was not visible to us, it sounded awfully close.

The next 15 seconds or however long it was seemed like a pretty long time as we watched David trying to get our engine re-started and we imagined a hippo in full on rush destroying our boat and then coming after us. And while that seems farfetched, it's really not. If we had been in its protected territory and it would have been close enough, there would have been a distinct possibility of that happening.

Eventually (and I'm sure it was not more than 15 seconds), the engine kicked in and we got moving again. But rather than heading upriver back to the boat and a hot breakfast, we moved downriver. And saw a hippo head in the middle of the river. So we moved to go around it. And found another one ahead of the boat's new path. And then another when we re-directed again. There were five or so of these creatures arrayed across the river watching us and cutting off any angle we took. So we decided caution was the better part of valor and slalomed between a couple of the heads and fled back home. This was way too close and I'm sure our speed saved us. But God forbid if that engine stopped. I never want to do that again really. Seriously.

I went to Africa to see the animals I looked at in zoos as a kid in their natural environments and learn and appreciate everything I could about them. And I did. I learned more about elephants, marabou storks, lions, hippos and a number of other species by watching and especially listening to them in unfenced and wide open nature in a few hours in Africa than I ever did in my whole life. I guess hippos are still my favorites, but I know for sure if I'm never in a small boat with these things in the water nearby, I'll be a happy man. It was totally scary. And totally worth it. I'll never forget the Chobe hippos. But I'll beware of them forever.

Hippo heads in the African sunset.