My name is Johnson and I am one of the guides at Garonga Safari Company. This month is my turn to write a blog. I choose to write a blog with these pictures of the elephants to share the story with you how we got them because it is not something I usually get to see.
We were with guests and they were really wanted to see elephants. I and my tracker, Phineas, we planned to search for them at western side of our reserve where last they were seen. We drove almost one and half hours before we got the fresh tracks, we stopped and showed our guests the tracks and signs where the elephants were feeding. Elephants eat lots of different food but it is usually easy to see where they have been eating. Sometimes they eat the insides of the bark off of trees and drop large pieces of the outer bark on the ground. Other times they shake marula trees to get them to drop all of their fruits to the ground so they can eat them. A lot of the time they eat branches from trees, sometimes this means they push over big trees to get to them and other times they just drop the half eaten branches in the road for us..
Elephants showing off some of their varied feeding preferences. ©Johnson Ntimane
The guests were very happy when we showed them the tracks, it meant that after all our work the elephants were close. We started to follow up on them for about 30 to 45 minutes and the tracks ended up leading us to one of our watering holes. With luck got them while they were still drinking water, wallowing and some of them were spraying over their body with water to cool down themselves. Our guests were very excited, when we found them, and they could see by naked eyes them swimming. We spent plus or minus 20 minutes on the sighting while they were still enjoying their bath and playing in the water. When they started to leave the dam, we also decided to continue with our drive.
Is not always that we get to see the elephants swimming or wallowing in the water, I find that so special to me and my guests. After the heat of the day we were very lucky to get different age groups in the dam drinking water, wallowing and swimming.
