Surrounded

2 close for comfort

Today was a day I will never forget. We woke up early for our drive and I was picked to drive the land rover. I was extra tired this morning and was in no mood to drive! This was my first day to drive and I had only had a few manual driving lessons with my brother before I left home. I was very nervous and hard a hard time focusing. Wen I climbed up into the driver seat, I sat up on the window and gave the pre-trail brief. When I sat back down I felt like I was in a spaceship and was overwhelmed by the stick shift and the pedals. To make things more difficult, I had to change the gears with my left hand since you drive on the right side of the car in South Africa. I stalled out the first 3 times and accidentally short circuited the whole vehicle a few times when I tried to take off  from 4th gear to 2nd gear. After a while I felt more confident in my driving by could not pay attention to anything else but the road and the stick in my hand.  We pulled over for some breakfast which consisted of cheese butter bread sandwiches, apple and hard boiled egg.

The rest of the day we didn’t see anything and decided to drive back to school. Just as we were making our way back, we noticed a huge breeding herd of elephants in the distance. Nellie and Sean (our instructors) found this to be a perfect opportunity to practice what we had learned about animal behaviors so they told the two people on the tracker seat to get back  inside the vehicle. They also took over the drivers seat because they were more experienced , which didn’t bother me one bit. They warned us that we were  going to get very close to the elephants and told us to be very still and be quiet! I figured they were over exaggerating ,but soon realized that was not the case.  First Seans group pulled up with half the students to test the herds patience, then when it was all clear we pulled up right behind them and switched off our engine, once you switch off your vehicle there is no turning them back on because this could scare the the herd which would be really bad for us! as we sat there taking  photo after photo of the herd and babies eating ,the elephants moved in closer and closer and closer until they completely surround our vehicles. Never before had I felt such a huge presence so close to me! Any  minute everything could go wrong, but we were there now and there was no turning back.

A  curious male decided to come right in front of our vehicle and get a good sniff by holding out his trunk right up in the air in front of us. He stood there so long looking at us that he propped one of his back legs on the other one to rest. This showed us that he felt calm and comfortable with us. Just as we started to feel too comftorable around them we noticed a group of females surrounding their babies trying to hide them from us. Just then 3 big males surrounded the other jeep and formed a wall and started to flap out their ears, put their trunks up in the air, and trumpet. At that moment I thought what the hell are we doing here?   Sean tried to calm them down by giving a reassuring  “shh shh calm down , calm down now” which actually worked, because they started to quiet down and slowly turned around and walked away.

Its pretty amazing how you can actually talk to an elephant and get them to change their mind by having a very calm and soothing voice, and ensuring them that its okay. This  can make all the difference between life and death. As we watched these huge magnifcent creatures dissapear off into the bush, I looked around and the look on everyones face was priceless! When the elephants were far away we jumped out of the jeep and my knees were shaking from all the adrenaline and excitement.

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