ZERO SHADES OF GREY

Chobe National Park, Botswana

How can one not see 600,000 t of heaving, grey animal flesh?

Botswana’s Chobe National Park is home to the world’s largest elephant population — up to

120,000 animals, weighing in at an average 5 t each. So if you go there, you can’t miss them, right? Wrong. On a recent three-day trip, I didn’t see a single one.

That’s almost unheard of in an area where elephant images dominate marketing material. Even Sedudu Island, which sits in the middle of the Chobe river and usually hosts “the greatest density of wildlife of any river system in the world”, was almost unoccupied, except by hippo and crocodile.

Timing, of course, is everything. Most of the year, animals are profusely visible. But when it’s raining hard, as it was when my party visited, they don’t need to come to the river.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t see plenty of wildlife. We did — just not what we expected. Foreign tourists, who provide most of the trade for lodges along the river, might have been disappointed at the absence of elephant and buffalo, but our group of South Africans, for whom these animals are not a novelty, wasn’t.

On boats and on safari vehicles, we got up close and (almost too) personal with huge crocodiles, were nearly within touching distance of fish eagles eating freshly caught catfish, and enjoyed frequent sightings of giraffe and nearly all the resident buck, including the puku, which is unique to the region. We even saw a pair of lionesses teaming up to hunt an impala.

Hippo, of course, were everywhere. One took up residence