![]() ![]() Other elephants-enough to create a substantial herd-were added over the years, from distant parts of Africa and as far afield as Canada and Sri Lanka. ![]() The idea for elephant-back safaris was initially that of photographer, socialite and Africa hand Peter Beard, who suggested to Moore in the 1980s that riding elephants through the African bush was unprecedented and would be an incomparable safari.Ību-“Father” in Arabic-was one of the earliest elephants, brought from a wildlife park in Texas, repatriated to Africa and, as the star of the camp and a natural performer, had appeared in several feature films before his death. Failing to find a home for them in Kenya (red tape, obstinate officialdom, bush confusion), he was welcomed in Botswana, where, as a wildlife entrepreneur, he started a training program for rescue elephants and pioneered his unusual safaris. Since he was on the payroll and knew the ropes, Moore inherited the elephants, which-stigmatized and vilified as “killer elephants”-he resolved to save by relocating them to Africa, as he describes in his book Back to Africa. Later, in Oregon, the man was stomped to death by his favorite elephant. The woman was gored and transfixed by the tusks of an enraged elephant-this occurred during a circus act before a large crowd of horrified Québécois in a small Canadian town. A pair of animal trainers, a man and woman who were his mentors at the school, were killed separately, but in quick succession, a consequence of the bull elephants in musth-a condition of high-testosterone aggression. By an odd set of circumstances he had come to possess three elephants. This elephant rescue scheme was the idea of Randall Moore, an American who had begun his working life shoveling great crumbly muffins of elephant dung at an animal-training school in Oregon. The camp had originally been conceived in the late 1980s as a refuge for “rescue elephants”-elephants that had survived a cull, or had been orphaned in the wild as a result of the mother being killed, or had suffered the torments and teasing of a circus, or been confined in a zoo or a wildlife park. The camp advertised itself as a “unique opportunity to bond with elephants firsthand,” and went on, “Situated in a vast private reserve of 400,000 acres, guests interact with the resident elephant herd, whether riding or walking with them through the bush. ![]() At Abu Camp (“Meet your inner elephant”) all they rode were elephants. In a channel of the Okavango Delta there was a luxury camp for visitors to ride elephants across the mushy ground, and through the tall grass and the swamps, to look at birds and big animals. The Okavango Delta, teeming with wildlife, and still pristine, is one of the great water holes of the continent. In Africa, animals-large and small-are found at water holes. This fertile deep green habitat for animals and birds and flowers, one of the glories of Africa, is without traditional villages-the Tswana people live almost entirely on the perimeter, entering the delta only to fish or hunt. Also present are seasonal swamps, and wide trenches called fossil rivers that once carried water, and ephemeral rivers, and permanent rivers: It is a water world. The result of the sprawling torrent of water are channels and flood zones and lagoons and islands of palms, and water so clean from percolating through the papyrus beds that it is drinkable. The precise and pretty name for this natural wonder of watery interstices and spreading rivulets is an alluvial fan. This river-lush and sodden and silted-empties all its flow into the middle of the Kalahari Desert. The Okavango is unusual in being landlocked the stream of the river, fed by numerous watercourses draining from a catchment area in the planalto of Angola, the wooded highlands of the far north, becomes a delta hundreds of miles wide. Most river deltas occur at the edge of a landmass, widening and dumping soil and water, enlarging the shore, pouring the current into a body of water. After miles of gravel and some upright spinning funnels of dust devils and the light brown scrub of the bush, and the immensity of woodland and camel thorns-after all that thirst, the Okavango Delta is unexpectedly drenched, as the desert deliquesces into a watery mirage, a deep green marvel that bubbles up and sprawls over the left shoulder of Botswana as a succession of swamps. ![]()
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