September means spring in Botswana’s western Okavango Delta, but the weather had turned summer hot. Our flight from Jo’burg’s Oliver Tambo airport had been delayed, putting us into Maun too late for our Mack Air charter to Abu Camp. Friends directed us to Marina’s – a friendly, comfortable and quiet lodge, 8 km north of downtown that can accommodate up to 18 guests in eight well-equipped rondavels with ceiling fans. We arrived in time for sundowners at the outdoor bar and put in orders for the day’s specials.

Marina’s was a good place to organize our kit for the three-night stay at Abu Camp and its world-famous elephant-back safari, created by pioneer safari operator and conservationist, the 57-year-old American, Randall Moore. My mother rode elephants in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus 60 years earlier, so the safari was especially meaningful.

Already during the 25-minute flight from Maun’s clean and laidback airport, we’d spotted small herds and solitary bull elephant from the air. There was dry savannah scrubland on one side and dramatically different wetlands on the other. The distinct game trails of hippo, buffalo and elephant, created a meandering pattern that criss-crossed the landscape of permanent swamps and floodplain grasslands, interrupted by islands dotted with termite mounds and wild date palms that, from the air, looked like African-scaled golf course sand traps.

Trast, our Setswana safari guide, was at the landing strip and greeted us with cold drinks for the 30-minute drive to camp in an ingenuously outfitted canopy-covered Land Rover complete with sturdy folding steps.

The army’s worth of pushed-over mopane trees and fresh elephant dung gave us our first impression of the 500,000-acre wildlife and wild elephant concession. The droppings from the eight elephants that make up Abu’s herd alone are so abundant that they are mixed into the Kalahari sand of the driving track to improve traction for the vehicles. We were in elephant country!

Just before reaching the camp, we crossed a 30-metre-long bridge made of mopane logs, which were recycled building poles that would be recycled again as firewood for the campfire. A malachite kingfisher let us approach within spitting distance, and a hippo noted our passing with a full-bodied grunt before disappearing.

Our camp manager, Jean Denis, welcomed the three ‘Baby Boomer’ couples from Zurich, the Netherlands, France and the USA, as well as a father and son, Simon and Julian, from the U.K. Mostly retired – and enjoying it – it was the Swiss couple’s first African safari and Simon’s thirtieth.

Although we’d worked and lived in Central and East Africa for nearly 25 years, nothing prepared us for the teak floors and copper fixtures (including double sinks and a movie-set bathtub big enough for two) of our spacious luxurious ‘Afro-Bedouin’ tent. The high sleigh-bed was stacked with down pillows, and a hammock swung on the deck in the breeze coming in from the lagoon.

After a perfect lunch of flaky-crusted leek pie and cold cuts set out on the deck under parasols, and a siesta, out little group crossed to ‘elephant island’ in modern, cushioned mokoros to meet our real companions on this safari – the diverse and international herd of six displaced or orphaned elephants, and two youngsters, including Sirheni, a Kruger Park cull survivor, who’d twice given birth in Botswana when she was covered by wild bulls allowed to mingle with the gently-tethered herd.

Sirheni’s, (and the Abu herd’s), first baby was born two months premature and died after 13 days. Since then, she’d delivered Pula (meaning ‘rain’ in Setswana), now a robust seven-year-old bull, and Baby Abu, born in May 2006, and named after the ‘gentle tusker’ Abu that Randall Moore had brought from America, and that was featured in Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter, Black Heart, as well as Lost in Africa (1992), Circles in the Forest, and numerous documentaries and commercials for IBM, Côte d’Or chocolates, and many more.

Baby Abu is the ultimate heart-winning charmer. He accompanied all six of our outings, trotting alongside either his mother or ‘Aunt Cathy’, the herd’s matriarch born in Uganda in 1960, captured in Murchison Falls National Park, and raised in a safari park near Toronto, Canada until Moore ‘found’ her and brought her back to Africa to star in Circles in the Forest, set in South Africa’s Knsyna Forest. Cathy – a favourite among the mahouts and appreciated by tourists for her steady ‘limousine’ ride, came to the Okavango in 1990 as a founding member of one of Africa’s first elephant-back safaris.

Standard procedures were in place to maximize safety at every step. We were first directed to sit together on the bench in front of the semi-circle of elephants whose names, stories, and mahouts were presented to us. The physically imposing headman, Collet, demonstrated how to mount and dismount the left side of the crouching animals, and how to sit, straddle and balance our positions in the comfortable, padded, and carefully adjusted saddles – one babysitted couple at a time.

Rudy and I were escorted to Mthondo Mbomvu, a very tall 32-year-old Zimbabwe bull with a massive and stately head who’d been a troublemaker at Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa until he joined the Abu herd in 1993 where his reliably good nature blossomed.

It was wonderful to feel him rise up underneath us with a gentle sway and swinging trunk. Then, in the cooling late-afternoon sun we set off, leading the group of pachyderms, the mahout’s knees tucked tight behind the mammoth’s ears as he encouraged Mthondo forward in firm but gentle English. Soon our caravan formed a spread-out diagonal line, moving at a stately pace across a stretch of water a kilometre wide to reach hard ground for our first ‘gamedrive.’

The magic was immediate. Without speeches and lectures, we simply began to experience elephant ways. The elephants were always allowed to stop for few minutes every time the spirit moved them to feed on the huge leaves of wild date palms that grew in thick clumps along the islands’ edges, or on the branches of dried-up acacias covered in three-inch-long thorns. We experienced their huge hunger for the most unlikely vegetation, which passes through their inefficient digestive systems in less than eight hours to come out the other end 60% ‘unprocessed’. Sitting on its back you feel the rumbles and gurgles along the digestive tract beneath you; and yes, you smell the blasting farts.

Baby Abu swam, suckled, picked pink water lilies, threw up dust or rolled in it, plucked small branches from fallen mopane trees, pushed along clumps of dirt with his tiny trunk, and danced between the legs of his tolerant family. One day, while I was riding Sirheni, Baby Abu disappeared from her sight for more than 20 minutes, and there was a chorus of loud trumpeting until mother, aunt and baby locked foreheads for several minutes to re-establish contact with chest-shaking bellowings before consenting to moving on.

Although game is not national-park-thick here, and we were able to approach hippo, giraffe, zebra, kudu and roan within unheard of distances, the mahouts do not insist on pushing their charges to actually mingle within herds, which could produce some unpredictable results. Still, we came in very close contact with hippo, and a small herd of young buffalo bulls, and watched each other for many minutes despite the clicks of busy cameras.

We proceeded past small groups of impala and families of warthogs to their utter indifference, although the red lechwe I’d come so far to photograph remained out of camera range; I was never able to satisfactorily capture on film that unique-to-Botswana antelope with lyre-shaped horns and bold black lines running down the front of its forelegs.

Walking on the ground alongside the elephants is its own experience, and the giant young Julian accompanied the two safari guides, Trast and Boyce, armed with a .375 Holland & Holland and .458 Winchester, not because of danger from our elephants, but to keep herds of wild elephants from creating havoc; they would fire in the air should uninvited company try to approach.

If I had a favourite ride, it was on Cathy with the Sri Lankan mahout, Sumi, who has lived with the Abu herd for 16 years while his family remains far away at home. Sitting behind his shapely shoulders and narrow waist, with Cathy’s ears fanning the air, made me think of butterflies and bats. That night, during Larium-induced dreams, I felt us take off, and wondered if Walt Disney had ever ridden a circus elephant.

If you show any interest along the way, the mahouts point out and name the rich birdlife: trees of perched reed cormorants, the buffy-coloured squacco herons whose wings splash bright white in flight, the circling open-billed storks waiting to descend on the mudflats for an orgy of snails, and the appropriately named hamerkop whose messy, dome-shaped nest sat in the fork of the giant tree close to the picnic the camp staff had laid out, along with blankets, pillows and books to sleep off the Pimm’s.

Before our elephant ‘drive’ back to camp, despite the heat of the day Trast took us to try our hands at catching bream on rods with spinners. I reeled in reeds, but Simon pulled in a 1.2 kg bream – our only catch of the day.

On the breezy boat ride back to our waiting pachyderms, we disturbed pretty pairs of pygmy geese and colourful jacana whose pale blue legs dangle lazily in flight. Back in the saddle, handsome Blacksmith plovers, fish eagles, and sturdy ground hornbills punctuated the familiar dove songs in the background.

Each outing ended with equally strict precautions for dismounting. Mthondo followed the verbal instructions to step backwards into position and graciously lifted his back foot for tethering. Then he would go down, deflating like a giant balloon until I could slide down his left side with the helpful hands of the guards.

The finale of our last dinner at Abu Camp will remain a surprise, but it gave me the opportunity to speak with Ph.D. Kate Evans. “Is it ethical,” I asked, “to import and release elephants into the wild when many wildlife biologists believe that Botswana’s estimated 110,000 to 130,000 elephants are too many, by the tens of thousands, for the carrying capacity of a country like Botswana, with its fragile ecosystems and water supply. (Three man-made waterholes are responsible for sustaining the elephants of Savuti in the Chobe National Park, whose channel ceased to flow in 1962.)

In addition to Botswana’s own elephant (over)population, like war refugees, elephants from Angola, Zambia, the Caprivi Strip and Zimbabwe have crossed into Botswana, probably never to migrate back towards the bushmeat hunters and poachers’ waiting guns.

Kate would answer that culling Botswana’s herds would never be acceptable, and that letting nature take its course is always preferable. I myself am deeply conflicted. My mahout allowed Cathy to do her job and demolish an already damaged large mopane tree, and rip off its large branches for an afternoon snack. The intensity and physical force of this task demonstrated, like no TV documentary ever could, the potential of huge herbivores to commit ecological suicide through habitat destruction, the effects of which would trickle down to the Kalahari sand. Already we saw ancient baobabs nudged towards death, and fan palms (one of the few trees that thrive on saline soils) knocked senseless by elephants.

But now, at Abu Camp, enamoured of each elephant’s personality and bewitched by their sociable behaviour, I cannot wish for a world with one less elephant. The solution to Botswana’s overpopulation of elephants ultimately lies in political solutions in the unstable lands beyond the country’s borders.

A member of the IUCN Antelope Specialist Group, Brooke Chilvers lives and works in France, New York and in Africa. She is the sporting art columnist for ‘Gray’s Sporting Journal’, and editor of ‘African Sporting Gazette.’

IN A BOX:

Contact Information
Marina’s, Shorobe Road, Maun: marinas@dynabyte.bw; tel: 6801 231; fax: 6861 017.

Mack Air, Mathiba 1 Rd, Maun: mackair@info.bw; tel: 6860

Abu Camp (www.abucamp.com) is booked through Wilderness Safaris: enquiry@wilderness.co.za