Addo

After the stop at the  cheese farm stall we drove on for many kilometres. We stopped in P.E. to get cash, petrol,airtime (prepaid cellphone time) and food and headed on to our stay for the night: Orange Elephant Backbackers, 8 km away from Addo Elephant National Parks main entrance! We arrived late and were way to late to book a Safari for the next day – what turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to us.

herd of zebras

 Addo is one of the parks where you are allowed in with your own car, so you can actually do your own safari! On the information centre, there is a board, where the rangers mark the areas, where animals were sighted this morning. So we did our own safari. We were up early again, so we were at the park entrance at something past 8 am. We drove trough the park the whole day, leaving at 5:30pm. It was awesome! First we saw only 2 single elephants (must have been bulls) and many many different deer-like animals. We saw many many pigs (like Pumba of the Lion King), even more zebras and gopher-like ones. Driving around checking right and left – and the road, because dungbeatles (Pillendreher-Käfer) have right of way in Addo! (unfortunately we didn’t see one of those) – was a lot of fun, and I turned out to be a pretty decent animal-finder! In the afternoon we found a herd of ellies than. Like a real herd: mothers and children, with two tiny baby elephants!

herd of elephants
mothers and babies

It was unbelievable and I was so afraid! Standing in the middle of a whole herd of these huge beasts with the tiny little car we had! We closed our windows, sat very still and waited till they moved on.

The passed around our car without anything, and the babies were so cute! They actually move like toddlers, and are just adorable! The mums were huge on contrary and scary to me. One thing that surprised me: Elephants have their tits between their front legs, not like cows between the hind legs! They do look pretty humanly with the two boobs like that!

After that we saw some ostriches, some more elephants, some more deers, some more zebras, lots of birds and monkeys! Cute little monkeys playing in the bushes!

in the middle of elephants

It was a wonderful day in Addo and we were sad that we couldn’t stay another day to try to find the 10 rhinos and 9 lions they have in the park there. We didn’t get to see the big 5, but we saw a lot of amazing animals!