Botswana: On Safari In Chobe National Park

In Botswana’s Chobe National Park you’ll have little trouble finding your very own ‘pachyderm parade’. Head to the Serondela region— via the mighty Victoria Falls — where the sheer variety of wildlife will jolt your inner child back to life.

- Audrey Gillan

Their trunks are twisted around each other, two teenage elephants knee-deep in water, tugging and pulling before letting go and continuing the jostling with their foreheads. Soon, another male joins this play fight and all three are piled up, bodies together, legs and proboscises akimbo, roughhousing in the Chobe River in the afternoon sun.

These prepubescent males hold me transfixed, as does the rest of their family, as I watch from a small boat a short distance away. There’s the matriarch alongside the other adult females in the group, plus the three teenagers and two babies, all at the edge of the river, drinking, floating, scratching themselves on the ebony and jackalberry trees, playing and swimming, taking delight in the fact that here in the water their bodyweight is reduced by half by the buoyancy in their bellies.

The babies mostly find shelter under the legs or the trunks of the females, but sometimes they stand alone, tentatively working out what this trunk thing does — up until they're a year old elephants can only use their mouths to drink water but when they're fully grown they can take in eight litres with one big snort. These babies are a comical sight — with big moon faces and fuzzy hair on their heads — and as I marvel at them, the tiny elephant singing ‘in a military style’ during Colonel Hathi’s March in The Jungle Book springs to mind. And so, gazing at the largest animals in Africa going about their daily business, I hear the refrain ‘hup, two, three, four’ and ‘We’re a crackerjack brigade. On a pachyderm parade. But we’d rather stroll to a water hole. For a furlough in the shade.’