My son saw his first elephant from the window of a tiny Cessna as we flew over the gleaming swamps of a delta: They were bulky shapes standing hip-deep (elephant-hip) in the water, patches of their skin blotched dark with cooling mud.
He saw his second elephant as we took a small power boat from the dirt airstrip where the Cessna had left us to the luxury tented camp where we would stay: There was a whole herd of them, in fact, massive bulls, tiny babes and irritated, protective mamas, drinking at the edge of the swamp grass in the shade of leadwood trees.
He saw his third elephant the next morning when he woke: The efelant, as he calls them, was a metre outside the mesh wall of our tent, loudly demolishing a tree, picking up jackalberry fruit berry by berry with its prehensile trunk tip. We sat and watched in petrified glee, close enough to see the efelant's eyelashes flutter.
By the next afternoon, when I realized a long-time dream to see elephants swimming in the waters of the Okavango Delta, my two-year-old son was over elephants. He wanted hippos. Maybe a lion.
The delta has all of these (soon a family of curious hippos would drown out our breakfast conversation with their harrumphing), but for me it was all about the elephants. They are abundant in the 16,800 square kilometres of the Okavango, and, unlike most other animals, they wade merrily through the reeds, making a slush, slush, slush sound like an overfilled washing machine as they go.
I have had the opportunity to learn a fair bit about elephants in five years as The Globe and Mail's Africa correspondent and have grown only more fascinated. I am also fortunate enough to live within a couple of hours' drive of some easily accessible elephant viewing.
The Okavango Delta, on the other hand, is about as inaccessible as it gets. But nothing compares to seeing the elephants here.
The Okavango is the world's largest inland delta. It begins high in the hills of central Angola as a river that flows south, cuts across the corner of Namibia and, not long after it rushes into Botswana, widens into thousands of channels and streams — like the wrist, then palm, then fingers of an outstretched hand, as one delta native described it to me — before draining into the sands of the Kalahari Desert.
The delta is an ever-changing terrain. It inundates in the rainy season — islands disappearing and re-emerging, the growth of vegetation blocking some channels and opening others. The landscape is a mix of woodland, savannah grasses and acacia trees, and watery areas, much of which are lined with high stands of bright green papyrus or lower swamp grass. It looks like nowhere else on Earth.
The delta is navigable only by canoe. The indigenous people of the area travel thousands of kilometres in mekoro, traditional dugouts. Mekoro are propelled by poles and they glide through the swamp grasses with a hushing sound.
It would be smoother and faster to travel on the open water than in the weeds, but those areas are kept clear by hippo traffic, and the last thing you want to do is encounter a hippo when you're shoulder-high in papyrus. A beauty queen on honeymoon in the delta did just that not long after I moved to Africa, and she did not live to tell the tale.
