ADDO ELEPHANT PARK
“It’s crowded and the ellies struggle to get a sip. Calves try to reach the water from the dam wall, but their trunks are too short, their feet too unsteady. The tourists hang from the bus windows with their cameras and cellphones – as soon as they have Wi-Fi again, their friends in Seattle and Antwerp will get to see the spectacle, too.”
Elephants and spekboom – that’s what most people think of when you mention Addo. But did you know that Addo stretches from the sea to the Karoo and has five biomes? It’s one of our most diverse national parks yet it’s compact enough to explore in less than a week. Here’s what you need to know.
I’m floating on my back in a cement dam somewhere in the Zuurberg when I see a long tube overhead. No, it’s not the trunk of an elephant but the nest of a spectacled weaver – one of many that my travel companion Eloise Costandius and I have seen during our visit.
It’s been a rainy few days and we’ve often had to make do with these “trunks”, instead of the real things, because the elephants have had no need to visit the waterholes. Our ellie tally will remain low because it’s our final night in the park and I don’t think they venture into this mountainous Kabouga section too often…
There were elephants here once, when the Iqua, Damasqua and Gonaqua people trekked along the Sundays, Kabouga and Wit rivers with their livestock. Maybe even when the Xhosa people built their kraals under the leadership of chiefs Cungwa and Habana.
But hunters arrived in the 1700s and killed anything that moved. Farms were marked out and the remaining elephants became a problem for the farmers. A major called PJ Pretorius was appointed in 1919 to exterminate the elephants – he killed 114 in a year and sold two calves to the Boswell Circus.
A local farmer, JT Harvey of the farm Barkly Bridge, didn’t accept the status quo. He decided to leave the elephants on his farm in peace, and that’s how Addo Elephant Park was born…
Our trip through Addo started five days ago in the indigenous forest of Woody Cape in the far eastern corner of the park. From there, we crossed the N2 to explore the grasslands and subtropical thickets of the Colchester and Main Camp areas. Tomorrow, we have one section left: across the Zuurberg to the Nama Karoo, where the greenery of last week will fade into shrubland and noorsveld.
To think: You can see all this in just one park!