An Elephant Whisker

Posted by Nicole in Wanderlust on -

A few words on the safari:

We all know that I love the zoo more than most 5 year olds, so I could have died of excited delirium when Leonard popped the top to our van and drove us into the Maasai Mara Game Reserve. Lions! Giraffes! Zebras! Hungry, hungry Hippos! Wildebeest! Rhinos! Elephants! Cheetahs! Warthogs! Water Buffalo! Crocs! Hyenas! Seeing all of those animals in the wild gave me goosebumps. And we crossed the border into Tanzania. Anyway, we spent hours in the van quoting The Lion King and enjoying God's creation. (For the record, Rafiki means "friend" and Simba means "lion" in Swahili.) Because it would take years to explain how I almost peed my pants every time we saw a new animal, here are a few of my favorite safari photos...

On our way back to Nairobi, we got lost. I'm pretty sure we were off-roading in Tanzania for a good chunk of time. The benefit of getting lost is that we came across something we wouldn't have under normal circumstances. In this case, it was a dead elephant. To the left of the red dirt road, the gentle giant took his last steps. He was laying on his side, and his tusks had been removed. An elephant with its tusks removed, is an elephant without a face. His trunk had been discarded and his face sliced off, exposing blood and tissue. We learned from the locals that the elephant had died in the morning from what appeared to be poison spear wounds, which were oozing pus by the time we arrived. The rangers came to remove the tusks since the poachers (supposedly members of the Gussi tribe) weren't in the vicinity when their victim went down.

Our drivers and David reverted to boyish tendencies, standing on the elephant's hardened belly, playing with the trunk, and pressing on the wounds so more pus seeped out. Leonard lifted the elephant's ear to find ticks with nickel-sized bellies making a mass exodus out of the flesh. He also plucked an elephant whisker from the trunk and gave it to me.

I can't say that I'm happy to have seen a dead elephant because it was disheartening, but I am thankful for such a unique experience.

On a much, much lighter note, on our last day in Nairobi, a few of us visited the Giraffe Center (that focuses on saving giraffes) and I fed, petted, and smooched a very pretty giraffe named Daisy!