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24^th May. Mbomu NP

Something chomping near the van woke us this morning; Joan had heard something similar at the last park. I looked out and here were two white rhino a couple of metres from the van happily feeding on the short grass at the camp site. Unfortunately it was too dark to take a photo. The hung around for a good 15 minutes before heading off. This is an unfenced camp site where animals wander through at will.

Our short drive to the first of the hides this morning took us through a forest of giraffes, we counted 26, majestically nibbling at the high branches. The two hides we initially went to overlooked a large pan full of birdlife and many hippos and crocodiles. We counted 16 crocs on a stretch of bank a couple of hundred metres long. It was all most impressive.

Mbomu is a small park which is nice for a change. I think there were only three vehicles in the park today. Generally attendances have been down on quite a few of the parks we have been to and in both the last two we have almost had the park to ourselves

25^th.Near Mozambique border.

We will cross over tomorrow morning. It’s only 150 kms to Maputo where we have to get a couple of things but most of it is on sand. It appears the Mozambique authorities have kept it sand to give the SA city dwellers a thrill on their 4x4 vehicles.

An interesting day today; after leaving Mbomu we dropped it to Pembe Elephant Park for a few hours. We hadn’t seen an elephant on the trip so far, it’s a small park and restricted to 4x4s due to the sand. The pachyderms here are meant to of the most purest stock and also the largest on the continent. There is also a hide here that has a 24hr web cam to show the world the goings on at the pan. Not sure on the address but if any one is interested typing in Pembe Pan View might get results (this will increase your knowledge of elephants Ewen). The animals there were very impressive but still no elephants. At the next pan we saw one big one then not long after that we ran into one on the track. Not literally but almost. There’s only one thing worse than coming on a family of them on the road and that is to come upon one, but in this case three, coming towards you and there is nowhere to go except in reverse. This we did until they finally headed off towards a pan. Not knowing how many more were coming we decided to turn around and get to a picnic area another way. On our way back what was an empty pan on the side of the road when we drove by the first time now had at least 15 elephants around it and more crossing the road both sides of us as well.

The pamphlet the people give you when entering the park has a lot of info on what to look for when one is becoming aggressive, things like: swinging the front foot, coiling & uncoiling the trunk, throwing objects towards the vehicle etc etc. None of them were displaying any of these, but still, I find these behemoths quite nerve wracking to be near.

This will be the last blog until we get the dongle sorted out for Mozambique but I believe they have good cell phone coverage.