Day 4 Elephants and Buffalo!

We’ve decided to stay another night and it’s a good thing we did! On the mornings hike we walked near the place we were yesterday but took a different route. We found Rhino tracks again and since the tracks were headed in the same direction we were going we followed them. Soon we heard loud grunts and growls. It sounded as if the Rhino’s were fighting just over the next bend. Mark instructed us that if they come this way we should get behind the rocks. As we walked closer they sounded more like lions than Rhino but then we heard the calf squeal and realized that it was rhino’s. That second when we thought it was lion though my heart stopped. We definitely didn’t want to be walking in on lions fighting. We could hear the rhinos for quite some time but could not seem to track them down. As we were walking in dense bushes we must have been circling around them and never coming close enough to see. Mark said it was probably a male trying to mate with a female who was not willing this he deducted from the calf squealing.

The afternoon we did another hike, We were trekking between two high cliffs and Mark was just telling us how many animals use this path to get down to the water when we saw a herd of elephants coming straight for us. The amount of dust they were kicking up told us how quickly they were moving towards us. We scrambled up the cliffs as fast as we could and as high as we possibly could get. It seemed to take ages to climb up those cliffs and Mark had to do it with a rifle in his hands. But then the elephants didn’t come. We sat there and sat there and nothing. We couldn’t see where they were because trees blocked our line of sight. Mark scrambled back down and was able to see them but they had slowed down and were eating. We sat on the cliffs for about 15 minutes and then this rumbling came and the elephants came into sight, a heard of about 10 and they were moving very quickly but as soon as they got to where we were sitting they stopped. One elephant turned towards where we were sitting and started to smell the area. Declan, was quite a bit lower on the cliffs then we were and we were worried that if the elephant came closer Declan was not high enough to be out of the way of it’s powerful trunk. Luckily they just sniffed a bit and carried on their way. We sat astounded by the experience when only seconds later a heard of buffalo followed behind the elephants. They stopped just short of where the elephants were and then turned and went back the way they came. Two of the big 5 encounters in a span of 2 minutes it was quite a rush. We were so glad that we stayed another night after that experience!