Close and personal with desert elephants in Damaraland

We headed West from Etosha toward the Skeleton Coast and soon reached the end of civilization, at the small town of Khorixas.  From then on, it would be just gravel or salt roads for the next week, and villages - let alone garages! - would be few and far in between.  We filled up at a wonderfully chaotic petrol station at Khorixas, where the whole local population - school kids, women with their shopping and workers alike - seemed to have gathered for a chat in the shade, and drove away into the real wilderness.

Driving in Namibia is an amazing experience. You feel really small and insignificant amidst the vast landscapes. The land stretches for hundreds of kilometres as far as the eye can see, with not a single sign of human activity, no houses, no factories, no cars...  (I can count with the fingers of one hand the nmber of cars we encountered).  The only 'traffic' around was the occasional herd of springbok, oryx (gemsbok), zebra, or the odd ostrich, roaming freely on the plains. The complete silence and sense of solitude can be overwhelming, but wonderful at the same time.

Herbert, the biggest of the bull elephants, was getting decidedly frisky so we knew it was time to go.

Damaraland in the Kunene region is a desolate terrain of semi-desert plains and a few rocky mountains.  We based ourselves at the wonderful Doro Nawas Camp, from where we could explore some of the area's main - and most accessible - attractions.

We visited the Petrified Forest, with its amazing remains of fossilized trees from 250 million years ago, the spectacular Organ Pipes rock formation, and Twyfelfontein, an area famous for its perfectly preserved ancient rock paintings and engravings of animals and various abstract motifs.   We just made one fatal mistake:  we felt like we deserved a bit of a lie in that morning to enjoy our luxurious room, and left our sightseeing a bit late.  It was only 11am when we got to Twyfelfontein but our thermometer already marked 40C and, with not one tree or any other shade in sight, the late spring sun was fierce and unforgiving!  It certainly taught us a lesson, not to oversleep again and always make the most of the cooler early hours.

Exhausted by the heat, we went back to the Camp to chill out in the pool for a couple of hours, before getting ready for afternoon adventure: tracking desert elephants!

Damaraland is home to the elusive desert elephant.  These amazing creatures - some argue that they are actually a different subspecies of the African elephant - have adapted to live in the harshest desert conditions with very little or no water, continuously on the move in search of the few existing water sources.

Rosie, one of the wilderness guides from Doro Nawas, took us and another couple on a big 4WD for a drive along the dry bed of the Huab River, in search of elephants.  We quickly learnt to spot the elephant tracks on the sand, and distinguish those that were old and already blown away by the wind from the freshest ones, where you could actually see the mark's of the elephant foot's veins and wrinkles.

I expected that, if we were really lucky (apparently, the same excursion the previous day had been unsuccessful), we would probably spot a few elephants in the distance, that would quickly disappear and run away from us.  I certainly wasn't prepared for what was to come!

After about an hour's drive, we finally saw them: a couple of elephants straight ahead of us on the riverbed.  We slowly drove on to get closer... and closer... and closer... until we stopped just a few metres away from them!  There was, in fact, a whole herd of about a dozen elephants there, both babies and adults.

Rosie, our guide, was the most valuable source of knowledge about the elephants and their behaviour.  She and the other guides from Doro Nawas know these elephants inside out.  They go out to search for them every day and spend hours watching them, studying their behavious, taking pictures or drawing.  They even have names for every single one of them!  This was Rosie's group, we learnt, this being the name given to the youngest baby in the herd, a tiny two month old elephant.

Watching the elephants was absolutely fascinating.  We were so close that you could even hear them munching away leaves and dry fruits. You could smell them... and, believe me, it wasn't always a pleasant smell, as we were in the middle of the mating season.  Emotions were obviously running high amongst them, and suddenly a fight broke between two of the males in the group.  Then there was Herbert, the biggest, oldest bull elephant in the herd.  He had definitely taken an interest in one of the females and would not allow anything - certainly not us! - to come between them.  He was staring at us, as we were 'in the way', and getting decidedly frisky, so Rosie decided it was time to go.

Back in the Camp, enjoying a cold beer on the bar terrace while watching the sun go down, we could hardly believe what we had just experienced. Our desert elephant adventure certainly rates top in all my travel memories, and it will be something difficult to beat...