WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY. ADVENTURE TRAVEL

That Night an Elephant Bull Walked Through Our Camp

And nobody noticed…

It was so surreal. Seeing those footprints. Right next to us. And it meant this animal had walked past our camp. While we slept. And that is the reason why they call them gentle giants.

We were on a trip in Namibia with friends in 2019. We planned on driving up one of the rivers running dry during this part of the year (or most of the time).

Living in the country we were locals and had lots of experience between the six of us. 3 vehicles with not much comfort but enough equipment to survive a few days in the wild.

We’d be off the beaten track, out of cell phone signal, and wouldn’t see another vehicle for the next 3 days. That’s how we like it. Raw. And wild.

The Ugab River is one of many rivers in Namibia which is only flowing during the rainy season and even then it needs a lot of rain, and I mean really a lot of rain, in the mountains for it to ever reach the ocean.

Since the country had been in a drought for years there was no fear or danger for us in driving in the dry riverbed. It was rather the opposite. Weeds and Bushes had grown so high that not only us but water would also have struggled to make it through.

I am jumping into the second day of the adventure where we pushed through the worst of the river we wanted to cover and decided to stop and set camp around lunchtime already. It was too hot to keep driving (no, none of us had air conditioning in our cars) and we just wanted to sit back and relax.

And so we did.

We scouted out the area and camped in a little elevated place with trees providing some shade.

Despite the heat, I was getting hungry. Nobody was willing to move out of the shade, so I took the lead. I dragged the bag of wood into the sun (don’t ask me why we had so much wood with us with all the dead trees in the surroundings) and started a fire to be able to make some food.

I also placed a camping shower in the tree behind the fireplace so that I could cool off myself after standing in the sun. This is Africa. Midday heat is no joke. And I was jumping between the fire and the shower back and forth until the sandwiches (alias braai broodjies) were made.

We enjoyed the rest of the afternoon in the serenity and stillness of this place. We might have had a drink or two or maybe a few more.

By the time night fell in, I was still eager to capture a photograph of the stars but my capabilities might have been restricted. I didn’t get to focus on the stars.

That night I woke up as my husband was sitting up in bed. We were sleeping on a mattress we had placed on the back of the pick-up truck. My husband doesn't like sleeping on the ground even though that’s what they made me do for the first few years of living in the country.

Being Namibian and having worked as a guide himself, my husband is well aware of the dangers of any wildlife out there.

And the reason why he woke up was the calling of a hyena. He hates hyenas. The only animal in the wild he fears more than a hyena is a leopard. Because well, they will just kill you. Right there and then.

But what are you gonna do now? You hear a hyena but I’m sure you’re not gonna get up and look for it. My husband decided to close the back end of the truck (as if that would help) and I turned around and fell asleep.

Our friends were sleeping on the ground. So we’d be safe for now.

We all heard the hyena that night. And we all heard it loud and clear.

The next morning we woke up and started to walk around our camp looking for the footprints. We were so focused that we didn't even see the obvious right in front of us.

After inspecting all the bushes in the surroundings we gave up on finding hyena prints and decided to return to camp.

That was when we stopped and wouldn’t believe what we saw.

Huge footprints.

Huge tracks of an old elephant bull (as my husband anticipated).

And those tracks were leading through our camp. They were going between our car and the mattresses the others were sleeping on.

This guy walked through our camp last night. When all of us were sleeping. And none of us heard even a cracking tree branch. We slept through his entire visit.

It’s unbelievable. But these tracks are the living proof of it.

And they are proof of the gentle giants.

They are for sure living in their own league.

Even though we didn’t get to see the desert elephants on this trip, we got pretty close to at least one of them. It is almost scary thinking back at it how close we were to one. But it is also beautiful.

Knowing this animal walked past us, watched us sleeping, and just went his way.

It’s not the animals we should be scared of. They are mostly more human than we are.

“I would rather be amongst forest animals and the sound of nature, than amongst city traffic and the noise of man.” — Anthony D. Williams.

More about my adventures in Namibia:

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