Please find the overview of my Garden Route trip here.
Today was the day all of us on the tour had been looking forward to: we were going on a safari in the Addo Elephant National Park! The Addo Elephant National Park was established in 1931 to save the eleven remaining elephants in the area, and it currently hosts over 500 elephants along with numerous other animals. In fact, although the Addo Elephant National Park is currently the third largest park in South Africa, we were told that because of the high density of animals in the section of the park that is freely accessible to visitors we were sure to spot plenty of them in a short period of time, in contrast to the more famous Kruger National Park where considerable intermediate driving distances are usually needed.
The drive to Addo would take about two hours and we needed to arrive there at the break of dawn, so we had to get up in the dead of night again. Especially the people who enthusiastically participated in the beer pong games of the evening before had a hard time waking up at 4:00. Unfortunately trying to get a bit more sleep in the van on the way to Addo proved rather difficult, as the roads we were traveling on were unpaved and full of holes which had us bouncing up and down in our seats rather than being able to rest.
We arrived in Addo at the stroke of six and had to transfer quickly from our tour van to an open-topped truck to go on a sunrise open-air game drive led by one of the park rangers. The game drive started off slowly, but as we made our way through the park more and more animals seemed to have woken up and started wandering around the plains. The first animals we saw were some warthogs, or “pumba’s” as they are colloquially known. The warthogs turned out to be quite common and we would see a bunch of them frolicking around on several occasions. Throughout the drive we also repeatedly saw small groups of various antelope species walking around, grazing, or resting between the bushes, including elands, red hartebeests, and kudus.
Some of the bovids we encountered: eland (upper left), kudu (upper right), buffalo (lower right), hartebeest (lower left).
Our mission was to spot a lion though. A few lions were introduced into the park a decade ago, and currently the park hosts nine lions. Given the size of the park and the limited number of lions a bit of luck is needed to spot one of them, but the park ranger told us that there had been some confirmed sightings in the previous days. Unfortunately, the spot where these sightings had happened turned out to be devoid of any animal movement, and after idling there for a short while we decided to move on to try our luck elsewhere. By chance it only took us a dozen minutes of driving to spot a vague brown shape in the distance. People owning fancy cameras with extreme zoom capacities were able to confirm that a lion was indeed reposing in the middle of the plains, but he was too far away to see him properly with the naked eye. Fortuitously, as we angled around to try to get a better view, all of a sudden a second lion was lying right there on the edge of the road! We careful drove closer and we managed to get within a mere ten meters without scaring the lion away. It seemed that we had disturbed his slumber though, as he showed us a big yawn and lazily got up. The lion let his presence be known by first marking his territory on a nearby bush, which was subsequently followed by emitting a roar. Instead of a single loud roar, this started off with a few tentative coughs that gradually increased in volume, culminating in a strong bellow after having led up to it for the preceding minute. Satisfied that his dominance had been ascertained the lion scrambled behind a bush and went back to sleep.
King of the jungle!
After the lion sighting we saw a few more antelopes, but there was no sign of any elephants yet. Before long the open-air game drive came to an end and we changed vehicles into the tour van to explore more distant areas of the park. The first new animal species we saw was a jackal darting around a watering hole, which I initially mistakenly considered to be a coyote similar to the ones I had seen a few months earlier in the Big Bend National Park in Texas. A few minutes later we suddenly and abruptly stopped in the middle of the road seemingly without any animal in the vicinity. However, our tour guide had spotted a flightless dung beetle, a species that is endemic to Addo, which was slowly crossing the road. Our next big spot, literally this time, was a Cape buffalo grazing close to the road.
Next we came upon some watering holes, and as the sun was rising and the day started to become hotter these turned out to be perfect spots to encounter some more animals. We had previously seen a single zebra walking around from afar, but at the watering hole a whole herd was quenching their thirst.
White stripes or black stripes?
We drove off to a second watering hole, and instead of zebras here we finally encountered the elephants that give the park its name. The African elephant is the largest living terrestrial animal, and we were all staring in awe at these colossi. The watering hole consisted of two different pools, and it seemed like the elephants had specific usages for both of them. From one pool a few elephants were peacefully drinking some water, while in the other pool some calfs were boisterously rolling around in the water while the bigger elephants were using their trunks to spray themselves with water. We were mesmerized by the elephants and could have spent the entire day watching them, but after a while our tour guide got us going again because we had a schedule to stick to.
During the following drive we passed several more elephants that were walking around, with one herd consisting of at least 20 to 30 elephants going by in a long column. At another instant we suddenly heard a loud noise emanating from the bushes. Even though we could not see what was happening we quickly reversed and backed off a bit to make sure we did not disturb an angered elephant, as you do not want one of those big animals charging at your car. When we cautiously drove by a few minutes later it turned out that the sound was emanating from a bull in heat.
We completed our tour of the park and saw a few more animal species we had already seen before and a few new birds, including some ostriches. Our main target was to try and spot a rhinoceros, but unfortunately these eluded us as all the moving grey shapes we observed in the bushes turned out to be elephants. Nevertheless, we had encountered three out of the big five from up close in their natural habitat, so no-one was overly disappointed.
It was not soon after we had left the Addo National Park that the early morning caught up with us and most everyone in the back of the van was snoring. We made a quick stop in Port Elizabeth to drop off one member of our group at the airport, and then drove back to JBay to pick up the trailer with our luggage we had left there in the morning. After a quick lunch we drove the long stretch back towards Sedgefield, where we would spend the night again. On the way there we still paused in Knysna to take in the view from the Knysna Heads, two cliffs overlooking the point where the inlet of the Knysna Lagoon meets the ocean.