Africa by Foot with Levison Wood
You can walk with elephants, but never try to outrun one
Claire Webb - 20 May 2020
When I was 11, my dad took me to an exhibition of paintings by the conser vationist David Shepherd. The ones I liked most were his amazing pictures of animals: tigers, zebras, rhinos and, most intriguing of all, elephants. From then on, I dreamt of going to Africa and seeing elephants in the wild, and that’s what I did.
In 2013, I walked the length of the Nile river, hiking more than 4,000 miles and witnessing elephants in their natural habitat in Tanzania, Uganda and South Sudan, where I was invited by the conservation charity Tusk Trust to visit a number of their projects. Ever since, I’ve been interested in conservation and wanted to make a documentary about how this remarkable species survives against the odds.
In my lifetime, the number of African elephants has plummeted to 415,000 due to poaching and habitat loss. Poaching has reached a critical level in countries like Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia, so many elephants have moved into Botswana. Last summer, I spent a month in Botswana walking more than 650 miles with elephants on their annual migration to the Okavango Delta. Every year, they walk hundreds of miles to reach plants with the right nutrients and they time it impeccably, coinciding with the rainy season. It wasn’t just a big feat for me: it’s a struggle for them, too, especially when they cross the Kalahari’s salt pans – vast areas where there’s no vegetation or water.
Botswana has an incredibly diverse landscape and a relatively small population – around two million people – which means there are enormous areas of wilderness and it’s a great place to see wildlife. In particular, I’d always wanted to visit the Okavango Delta, which is one of the last great wildernesses left in Africa: swampy, lush, absolutely beautiful.
My guide was called Kane and grew up as a nomad and a hunter-gatherer. He’s a San and his people know all the plants and roots single part of it you can eat and nothing goes to waste. If they kill a buffalo or an antelope – they even use the bones to make cutlery. As the modern world has encroached, they’ve been forced to integrate, but they’ve kept some of their traditions and still go out hunting and foraging. Kane knows everything there is to know about the animals and he can make their sounds too, which was handy. If we wanted to see lions, he’d make the noise of a dying antelope and the lions would come to us.
At times it was like a scene from The Lion King: all these different species around the watering hole together – elephants next to giraffes, next to rhinos. Another day, I saw a leopard two metres away. I’d never seen one in the wild before, so that was really special for me.
I had lots of close encounters, but you’ve got to expect that when you’re walking through national parks. You’ve got to stay alert and watch out for dangers. We had lions walking through our camp at night, and when I was in a little dugout canoe on the river, some hippos charged. You can get within a few metres of elephants if you know what you’re doing, and Kane showed me how to do it safely. As long as you’re downwind and not annoying them, they’re happy for you to get that close. You can’t outpace an elephant; you try not to run until you don’t have any other choice, and there were a couple of occasions when we didn’t have any choice. The second time was really scary: a big bull – a male elephant in its prime with big tusks – came straight at me, trumpeting and flapping its ears. If you find a big tree to get behind, elephants will generally stop, and luckily he did. Nothing gets the adrenaline pumping like an elephant chasing you, and I was definitely thinking, “What on earth am I doing here?”
Not everyone wants to get quite so close and personal to wild animals, of course, but there are plenty of places where you can go on a foot safari and be very safe, and I’d recommend everyone to go and do it. By contributing to the local economy, tourism plays a really important part in conservation. Without safaris, wildlife is devalued in the minds of locals. It brings people out of poverty and incentivises them not to be poachers. Why should they bother looking after elephants if nobody’s coming and paying to see them? It makes more economic sense to dig up the ground, plant crops, and if an elephant comes, they’ll kill it. So when we’re able to travel freely again it’s really important that we go and see these magnificent animals, and that we travel responsibly, pick local operators and spend our money in these countries.
AS TOLD TO CLAIRE WEBB
The Last Giants: the Rise and Fall of the African Elephant by Levison Wood is published in hardback by Hodder