Elephant experience

“Elephants love reunions. They recognize one another after years and years of separation and greet each other with wild, boisterous joy. There’s bellowing and trumpeting, ear flapping and rubbing. Trunks entwine.”

The camp offers a safe passage and sanctuary to these elephants where they can gather, to drink and jostle and bath themselves in the mud to protect their skins against the harsh African sun and UV radiation. Our popular drinking hole and play pool, (for our elephants as much as our guests) where up to 140 elephants in the dry season from about June to October can gather at a time, is replenished every day with 35 000 litres of natural drinking water, because they can drink up to 180 litres a day!

International accolade

So extraordinary is the interaction with elephants that Disney nature visit the camp every year to film the breeding elephants. There is an earthcam focussed on the drinking hole which was chosen as one of the top 25 in the world for uniqueness of its content. Live footage can be seen on www.earthcam.com/world/Botswana/chobe.

Enjoy a sneak preview before you travel or if you are getting withdrawals from watching these beautiful creatures up close, log on when you get home.

But of course, nothing can usurp the real time observation of these mammoths. You are likely to see: The young males jostling each other like adolescent boys at break; the matriarchs and mothers arriving with their diminutive and clumsy calves; a large adult male looming out of the black night, a solitary silhouette against the Africa night or a young calf who has not quite got control of the 40 000 separate muscles in its trunk. Their comical lack of control means they stand on it and sometimes it snakes out of control like a garden hose. Or you can watch a calf’s first comic attempts to suck up water and spray itself – missing more often than not.

The Chobe River, situated not too far from Camp Kuzuma, supports up to 50 000 elephants in the dry season when the water in the hinterland has dried up. Botswana also has a very active and effective non-profit group, Elephants Without Borders, who works hard at supporting the sustainability of the elephant, as well as other wildlife in this area. So, for any person eager to have an up-close safari experience with elephants Camp Kuzuma is the ideal spot to be.