Our last day at Addo

Our last day at the Addo Elephant Park consisted of a walk along the Discovery Path which is inside the fence for the Main Camp and Sheila was able for the first time get up close to some of the plants we have been seeing on our drives. We also got a close up view of the Armstrong fence that surrounds the park and the main camp.

The Armstrong fence was invented by a fellow named Armstrong to keep the elephants in the park and not raiding farmers fields. It was originally made from tramway rails ripped up in J'berg and Cape Town and used elevator cables donated by Otis.

After the walk we drove to Jack's Picnic Site where we had our lunch. We were visited by a number of birds including the one below which we saw many times siting on the top of bushes.

We came across this young male taking a bath.

The main event of this day was observing elephant behaviour.

He quickly left the water hole when this larger male approached aggressively.

At a different waterhole we watched this small group run past us apparently in some alarm.

On our way back to camp we came across this mother elephant and her calf who was nursing at the time of our arrival but the calf stopped before we could get our cameras out.

The mother elephant moved on to a mud wallow where she proceeded to throw mud up onto herself  with her trunk

Finally on the sundowner drive which will be the topic of the next blog post we came upon a herd of elephants with a big bull elephant in musht ?sp. that is sexually aroused. In the photo below he is off to check out which of his females might be receptive to his advances.