Addo Elephant National Park

After the disappointment of not seeing a single elephant in Etosha, we decided to up the odds and head for Addo, which has 450 elephants in an area less than a tenth of Etosha. We had to push it to reach the Orange Elephant backpackers from Bloukrans before dark, and skirting round the edge of Port Elizabeth at dusk, I was glad we were no later.














Addo is another self-drive park (although you can do 2-hour game drives with the guides), and with only one sighting on the board at 10am, we drove off in that direction. Of course elephants annoyingly move around, and whist there was plenty of evidence in the form of large piles of dung on the road (one should avoid running this over to protect the dung beetles), after 2 hours of driving round we'd not seen one.














Looking increasingly like we'd fail to see any, we made our way back for lunch, and straight into the path of a herd crossing the road to the water hole. One of them obviously thought we'd looked at him funny, and did the ear waving thing (a warning sign) – Kirsten quickly wound up the window, and he walked off.














The afternoon was far more productive, with our progress repeatedly stopped by elephants walking down the middle of the road - when something weighting 6 tons is lumbering past your car, you're just glad they don't decide to sit down. Addo also has masses of warthogs, antelope and cape buffalo, however we didn't see any of the black rhinos, or recently re-introduced lions and hyenas.















As an alternative to driving, we took the early morning (novice) game ride. This takes place in a area of the park absent of lions and hyenas, but the horses were still a little skittish in the early morning mist. We didn't see any elephants (or much else besides ostriches and far away antelope) on the ride, but it was still good fun.














After the ride, armed with newly purchased binoculars from the park shop, we did another game drive, before driving down to East London (as dismal as its namesake). Driving the N2 can be a hairy experience at times; South Africa has over 10,000 roads deaths per year – given peoples inclination to overtake on blind corners, it's not hard to see why.