The Elephant Who Came to Breakfast

Thom's mother Kathie came for a visit at the end of February. We took her to Madikwe for a night and stayed at Buffalo Ridge Safari Lodge (http://buffaloridgesafari.com/). It's one of the community lodges in Madikwe, managed and staffed by a local community. When we arrived, the manager told us that we were having crocodile ribs for lunch. We immediately thought of Fred Flinstone and his big rack of ribs on top of the car. Thom was really looking forward to tackling such ribs. Lunch turned out to be quite nice even though the entree was crocodile WRAPS -- not ribs. Grilled croc meat, asparagus, cucumber, tomato, too many carrots served in a tortilla wrap.

Anyway, this blog is actually about the Friday morning game drive. When we stopped for morning coffee, our guide noticed that there was an elephant far in the distance coming our way. He told us that although he wouldn't have stopped if he had seen the elephant before stopping, we should be able to finish coffee before the elephant got to us if he continued on the path it seemed he was taking. So we had coffee and hot chocolate while we watched the elephant come closer and closer.

When our guide noticed that the elephant was traveling much faster than it had appeared and not veering from the "road", he quickly packed up the coffee stuff and told us to get in the truck...NOW.

We, of course, obeyed immediately. As our guide mentioned, we really did not want to become famous for being trampled by an elephant on an early morning game drive. Our guide positioned the vehicle so that we could get out of the way of the elephant no matter which direction he decided to take and we had to do a bit of manuevering as the elephant approached. It turned out that the elephant was very cranky. Evidently he had struck out on the elephant club scene the night before and was still looking for "a date".

The cranky elephant did pass by without bothering us and we went on our way to enjoy the rest of our game drive.

If you have a lot of extra time and want to see more of our photos from this adventure in Madikwe, you can view our photos at shutterfly: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AbtWzhs0bt3WQ&emid=sharshar&linkid=link5