Elephants and Elephants

 

Just thought I'd mess with you and start with a pedestrian road crossing, otherwise known here as a zebra crossing.

The Addo Elephant National Park is the third largest South African National park at 1,640 km² -- that's over 400,000 acres. It was founded in 1931 and contains a wide variety of African wildlife  -- specializing in the Elephants. Since the park stretches all the way to the Indian Ocean, it claims to be the only park in the world to house Africa's "Big 7“ -elephant, rhinoceros, lion, buffalo, leopard, whale and great white shark - in their natural habitat. We stayed at a high-end place, the Hitgeheim Country Lodge. We took the mid-week special where we paid for two nights and got the third free.

The private suite

What I always dreamed of as a child, my own princess bed.

Being sophisticated eating my soup de jour along with two glasses of red wine.

OK, that's as long as I can hold off posting elephant pictures. The best place to watch the herd was near the waterholes. For us, the afternoon bathing was the peak.

Water games seems to be the young elephants sport.

This one managed to dig his tusk into the mud.

A baby breastfeeding. 

Not an elephant - a golden mongoose

This is a really young elephant

The teenagers playing

A leopard tortoise 

A Red Hartebeest

Another old. lonely, bachelor Cape Buffalo who was kicked out of the herd

A Jackal in the distance, getting ready for cleanup duty

Eland

Well covered with their sunburn protection dirt

A Red Bishop, a type of weaver bird

When you are driving along the dirt roads in the park they ask you not to drive over the elephant dung piles, so you don't harm the Dung Beatles. These guys do a good job of cleaning up the dung and keeping the flies down.

A Dung Beatle crossing the road in front of us.

Working really hard to roll his fist-sized dung ball back home.

Kudu

The wild male ostriches are much larger than the ones in the ostrich farms. The top of this guys legs was near the roof top of our little rental car. You would not want to tussle with him.

Another Golden Mongoose doing his I'm surprised look.

This guy was up on all fours and in a hurry to get across the road.

Heading home for the night

The newborns stick close to mom

As soon as the herd starts moving they surround the baby for group protection. They walk so close to the small one that it looks like it will get trampled by the huge feet stomping down. Somehow they all manage to not hurt the youngster.

More teenage boy behavior.

A 13 seconds no-videos in the blog violation -- elephants running to the water hole

Gotta say, I really like this picture.

Paul