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| | | | | ABU CAMP : safari with the Elephant Master | | | | | ABU CAMP : safari with the Elephant Master (90 photos) |  Send this reportage | | A trip to the other side of the world, an encounter with wild animals… while travelling on an elephant back, it is like a dream of a child comes true. In the meanders moved back to the Okavango Delta, the Amercican Randall Moore, as if he came out of a fiction, he has devoted his life to the pachyderm of Africa, and he is offering visitors a truly amazing experience... | | © S. FRANCES./TheReportage.com | | Categories: Adventure, Environment, Tourism, Travel, Animals, Men Interest, Outdoor |  |
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 Page 1 2 3 4 5 6  Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 | | | | In the Okavango Delta, sunrise seems to be the very beginning of the world. One by one, the different species are cleaning themselves after a night of sleep or hunting, always in the same order while making so much noise. The insects are the first to dance, with a deafening screech; then flamboyant birds join and greet the sun, followed by the big growling cats as they return from their sleep.
From a “bird’s eye” position on the top of an elephant, this ritual looks tiny. Altitude, balancing, silence: we are following a leopard marking out its territory after a downpour. A piece of luck for felins who usually do their wandering at night.
Our caravan of seven elephants led by mahouts had set off before dawn. We were still half asleep when we had to walk to the elephants, climb onto the platform strapped on their backs and hang on tight until they got to their feet. Far from any recognizable points, we are quite little in the middle of the virgin nature and a little bit worried, we left toward the unknown. From our saddles, we have a commanding view over the vast expanse of African bush. The steps of the animals are powerful and silent. The skin of their huge ears seem to be tanned by thousand-year-old memories, instinct and intelligence.
There is no engine, no vehicle for protection, we are the part of the wildlife that in turn was there for us.
“I live among the elephants. I like listening to them and watch them on the horizon. I would give anything to become an elephant.” Randall Moore, with a cigar, often quoting from the French author Romain Gary, was steering his herd of giraffe neatly aligned, like musical notes on a stave.
In Romain Gary’s novel “Roots of Heaven”, Morel, the hero, tracks down ivory hunters. Here, Moore, the flamboyant American pioneer of elephant-back safaris, has become a legend of Okavango. Over the last thirty years, he has brought dozens of elephants back to Africa, saving them from a dismal existence in circuses and zoos. Everybody said it was impossible, but he succeeded in training African elephants; he was the first to do it, and some turned into even movie stars. He was also determined to find a heaven for them, a hidden paradise on the Earth where he could release the animals he looked after. Okavango, a thousand miles from any human settlement, is a sanctuary in the heart of southern Africa, a unique delta formed by the conjuction of rivers and deserts. This conjuction has produced fertile wetlands with a network of canals and lagoons, and bush areas with palm trees, acacias, baobabs and even papyrus. This paradise of biodiversity is home to about 122 mammal species and more than 400 bird species. This morning we look for eagles, buffaloes, lions and zebras. We are accompanied by dozens of antelopes, leaping across the plain.
Leaving a clearing surrounded by sycamores, we come across a herd of wild elephants. Randall smiled. “There’s Mufunyani and his group; we released them three years ago. He is tagged with a satellite antenna so that we can study his behavior in the wild. But he finds it hard to leave us! At night he prowls around the camp near our tents.” When you see Randall Moore looking after his elephants, so chatty and confident, it is difficult to imagine him back in Oregon, avoiding the draft at the time of the Vietnam war. But that is the beginning of his story – a love story.
As a young man in 1971, leading an aimless existence, he met an artistic couple who were raising exotic animals, and that was when he made the acquaintance of his first three elephants. “They were from South Africa where thousands of elephants were massacred. Europe and the United States bought up the orphan babies.” Love at first sight: Randall takes up a job on the farm. He wants to taking the three animals back to their homeland. Randall, the ex-hippie, had his hair cut, bought up every book on elephants he could find, and began studying biology and zoology. He is so gentle when he talks about Cathy, the matriarch of the herd, but more authoritarian when speaking of Mithondo Mbomvo, the huge male who shakes the earth when he walks by. Moore knows everything about these animals, their every mood. “They have remarkable instincts and can remember more than sixty orders. When they move their trunks around you, they are actually sizing you up; I call it the ‘sniff test’. They do it amongst themselves too, in order to get to know each other.” Moving through the bush with this man who shows such devotion, we could almost forget about the extraordinary wildlife in which we assist. Elephants are all that count! Randall Moore has spent years buying up animals in America, then loading them into trucks and ships, to bring them across the oceans to Africa; and he has found a haven where they can return to freedom. For years he wandered from one national park to another. No one was interested in him or his elephants, but soon after he has just found a remarkably intelligent animal named Abu, a South African film-maker asked him to participate in a wildlife film he was shooting. Then, from one film to the next, the legend of Randall Moore was born – the story of the only man able to train African elephants. In 1990, Abu was partner to Clint Eastwood in “White Hunter, Black Heart”, and more productions came, ranging from Patrick Grandperret to the Walt Disney studios. In the late 1980s, Randall was working on an idea suggested by the photographer, Peter Beard, and set off to take his entire group to northern Botswana for his first safaris. Today the herd have their haven in Africa, at Abu Camp, the lodge named after his favorite elephant. And the adventure does not stop there: after a few years of transporting visitors, the elephants are released into the bush and then monitored by researchers. After sunset we were back at camp where a fire was burning and a magnificent meal was ready, served “al fresco” – so simple and so elegant! There was the splendid feeling of being the only people in the world, because the camp never host more than ten or so guests at the same time. There are no modern means of communication as a link with the rest of the world. All eyes were shining with childlike wonderment, at this magic moment, with the feeling that a dream had come true. Later, inside our luxury tents, decorated as in the days of the great explorers, we could hear the bush dropping off to sleep to a chorus of croaking frogs. Then some of these grand animals had returned to the wild to visit us. We simply had to follow Randall Moore’s advice: “Don’t be afraid. Make no noise. Just listen to them moaning with pleasure as they chomp on the acacia branches”.
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