We spent our last morning at the Victoria Falls River Lodge, engaged in a safari drive around a section of the Zambezi National Park. It was a very interesting morning trip before we were to drive to Botswana for the last section of our African Holiday at Little Vumbura, Kwedi Concession. We had our second encounter with a herd of African Buffalo this morning. The Buffalo would only occasionally acknowledge our presence by walking around us and having a vague look in our direction.
There were no signs of the top five predators around sniffing the situation to see whether Buffalo was on the menu this morning. However there were a few Hyena about who appeared to be thinking of this possibility but they didn’t appear overly energetic so I don’t think the buffalo herd was in danger of losing one of the older beasts that day.
We had only seen a few elephants at a distance over our three day in Victoria Falls so I mentioned this to our driver and almost magically a few minutes later we came upon a reasonably large herd, eating their way through the bush country, snapping off small branches and generally appearing very satisfied with their lot.
This was a large herd and there were a number of younger elephants trailing along behind their mothers and getting shown where the best food was to be obtained.
In the Londolozi Varti Camp back in the South African Kruger National Park, our drivers would have been able to follow the elephants through the actual bush land. In the Zambezi National Park in Zimbabwe, our safari drivers were restricted to staying on the ‘built’ roads so after a while our guide decided that he knew where other elephants were and so he changed course and headed towards a section of the Zambezi River. Here there were definitely plenty of elephants that liked a river-side outlook but the feed was a lot more restricted. It was mainly river side grass.
As we sat and watched these elephants, we noticed that a few of them liked wading in the river water from small rocky outcrops to small islands where they could have a feed on the low growing grass.
I didn’t notice any signs in Zimbabwe offering elephant rides as one way of exploring the country. However on the other side of the river from us in Zambia, one tourist camp 10 Km outside of Livingstone did offer ‘elephant-back’ safaris to explore their National Park
FOGTRAVEL 