…Elephants.

That’s what Addo National Park is all about.
Its made up of over 180,000 hectares across five different biomes: Forest, Albany Thicket, Fynbos, Nama Karoo and Indian Ocean Coastal Belt (including some huge dunes).

The high scrub / Thicket makes spotting game tricky in some places,

but over 4-5 days we saw Red Hartebeest (those are the dunes, not snow in the background)….

…many Warthogs (most of whom had young with them)…

…Zebra (also with foals)…

…an occasional Buffalo…

…Blue Cranes, waterbirds & Terrapins…

…and even a mouse…

Mind you, he was keeping his head down, due to the variety of raptors that are around.

We even saw lion (here they have the same dark manes as those in The Kalahari)

This one proved to be another ‘Marilyn’ and spent most of her time in the appropriate position…

But, despite the huge size of the park, one thing you are pretty much guaranteed to see are elephants.
We were fortune to see them all shapes and sizes…

We were also doubly fortune one day to come across 70-80 of them at the same time at a waterhole.
Drinking…

…grazing…

…applying sunscreen…

…nursing…

…messing about in the water…

…jousting…

…mating…

…swimming…

…and generally larking about (much to the disgust of the warthogs who they chased off every time they tried to come down for a drink).

For the four and a half hours that we sat there engrossed though, it was the youngsters that were the star of the show.

There’s little more cute than watching them trot as they try to keep up with mum…

…or watching the older kids laze about trying to look cool.

Oddly though, if you to ask a zoologist what’s so special about Addo Park, they’d probably tell you it’s the very rare Flightless Dung Beetle.

They’d probably tell you that the elephants are there just to provide the raw materials required to keep the beetle from becoming extinct. From watching them for many hours I can assure you they certainly produce enough to sustain the local beetle population.