When at the end of the day the herd of large animals you find in the grass turn out to be elephants instead of the rhinos you were looking for and you say “It is just another herd of elephants,” you know you have been on too many game drives. This was the first time we have been to Umfolozi and Hluhluwe and never saw a single rhino. But we found lots of elephants and at one time we were pretty much surrounded by them.

The nice sized bull found a great place to eat – unfortunately it was right across the road that we needed to go down. While it was great to get some good close-ups it would have been nice if he had decided to go elsewhere for his main course.

Because a big bull was blocking one road of a Y we backed up so we could go the other way and lo and behold a family of them came out of the bush and paraded down the other road. We could do nothing but patiently wait until they all decided to get off the road and eat in the bush.

Not their best end…but we saw a lot of this view in our drives.

Mother and child…honest the child is there.

We did not find any elephants at the usual mud hole because it seemed to be pretty dry, but we did later find them along the Umfolozi river.

We were heading down the road on the last part of the drive and were surprised to come across this single elephant crossing in front of us. We thought he would be our last elephant of our mission so we took a number of pictures including what we will call our last elephant picture. We would have rather have found a rhino crossing the road.

This was the last picture of an elephant we took while on our mission. We could have taken some very distant shots later – as mentioned about – but did not bother.