Elephants

Last week the mother of one of the other volunteers came to Burkina to visit and I decided to meet them at a town not far from Bobo that is famous for regular elephant sitings. We arrived on a Tuesday and just spent the day chatting and relaxing by the river. Since I live in Bobo I don't get the best view of the night sky because of all the "city lights." But out there in elephant land the sky was dazzling with millions of stars. And it was so peaceful as the three of us were the only ones at the site (even though nature is LOUD at night! goodness crickets and frogs and who knows what else, all harmonizing together). Our "guide" told us to meet him at 8 the next morning. Without any briefing, warning, etc. he came and got us and we set off on foot to find the elephants, our guide in front, then me, the other volunteer, her mom, and then another Burkinabe guy bringing up the rear hanging on to a 4 foot stick - like one he just broke off the tree. I wondered to myself what exactly he thought that stick might come in useful for, but I assumed he knew what he was doing. So off we (the white people) went chatting and laughing along the way until we noticed that our guide had started stepping a little more cautiously, then the talking stopped. After about 10 minutes of walking he started walking REALLY cautiously and stopping and squatting down to look under the trees. So of course we followed his lead, and looked so funny, all crouched down together peering around. The other volunteer gave our guide the new name of "African ninja." That's exactly what he reminded me of. THEN, he put his fingers to his lips (to tell us to be vewy qwiet) and he pointed straight ahead of us to where a whole line of elephants was walking by about 50 yds away. It was breathtaking! We were in awe. I started counting, one big, one baby, a teenager, another baby, another big, another medium...and then the first one turned towards where we were standing and her ears waved out really big. Then the other big one did too. Then they all turned and started coming our way! We gasped and when I turned to our guide to see what we were supposed to do he was gone! He had taken off running with the other guy with the stick! So me and the other girl and her mom high-tailed it out of there. My heart was in my throat. I kept thinking to myself, "as long as we don't feel the ground shaking, the elephants probably aren't running after us, so we should be ok." But of course images of us getting trampled by a whole herd of elephants were running through my mind. I thought "what will I do if they catch up to us? climb a tree? oh, why didn't I brush up on 'what to do if being chased by elephants' before I came?!!" It was exhilarating! We finally caught up to our guides, who were crouched down by the side of the river, and they said maybe we can go back to camp and wait for them there. Yeah, thanks African ninja! So we went back and got a beer and looked through the excellent pictures they took of the elephants. In total there were 13! Just walking in the wild! After 2 beers our African ninja came over to us and pointed at where 2 more were walking right by the camp. Soooo cool. I'll post the pics after I get them uploaded.