Addo Elephant Park

  Addo, South Africa
Thursday, January 26, 2006

Hello Everyone,

We left the Hogsback area and headed to a town called Addo. There are a couple of different gameparks around here. Addo Elephant Park is one of the most visited. We checked into a B&B on a farm in the area. It had nice gardens and the rooms were as nice as a hotel. The owners were very friendly. It was called Homestead B&B.

The Addo park just recentely aquired another 120,000 hectares of land and will be purchasing more in the future. We tried to get accomodation in the park, but they were booked well into the next month. They have safari type rooms that are up on stilts overlooking the park. You can sit out on the deck and watch elephant roam out in front of you. The park currently has over 400 elephants in it.



The park was just a short distance down the road from the B&B. We drove around it for several hours until closing. We got to sit in the car and really observe the elephants behaviour. There were many babies, one couldn't have been more than a couple of weeks old. He was so cute.

We witnessed a strange event. A large group of elephants started to head to a waterhole. We followed them. More and more elephants started to come out of the shrubs to the water. All the adults gathered on one side of it and the younger ones went to the other side. A few sniffed at the water with their trunks. Then as suddenly as they appeared they all started to run in another direction. Maybe they didn't like the smell of the water. One lonely worthog was left standing there drinking as the elephants took off creating a pile of dust. We later saw some elephants bathing in a different watering hole. Some of the young males were play fighting with each other. They are such a fascinating animal to watch.



Of course with all the elephants the park is a heaven for the Dung Beetle. There are also supposed to be some lion and hyenna here, but we didn't see any. We did see a few different bucks.

See you at the next stop.