Desert Wonderers

Campfires, and deserts: travels in the wilderness

In 2025 we spent a couple of weeks in the Hoanib Valley enjoying the company of elephants. Although, I haven’t had time to describe the trip, I thought I would post some of the photos.

When we watch wild animals we are very careful never to crowd them. I love elephants and could, and did, spend hours with them. But we are very respectful. We drive ahead, hopefully working out where they are going, and allow them to come to us. We leave space behind our vehicle so we can reverse away, if they wanted to be where we are – which they often seemed to!

This large bull patrols the valley. We usually found him in the west of the valley, but this photo was taken in the east. There had been 3 young bulls who had moved through the valley a few days before, and we think he was making sure they had left.
He thought it was fun to chase a guinea fowl. I wonder why the young needed to chase when they don’t catch their food

One morning we got to the waterhole and Stompie and her entire family were there. We knew them from last year, when we had followed them for days. In 2025 we had seen a couple of them together, but this was the first time we saw her family all together.

And then there was the lion

We saw the baboons looking towards the waterhole and were wondering why, when we saw her.
They lodge vehicle was tracking the lion. When they lost sight of her, did they realise where she had gone?

We followed the lion when she left the waterhole and discovered she had just killed an oyrx.

The lion successfully dragged the dead oyrx to the shade of a tree. She spent the next few days eating from it.
After she removed the oyrx, she went back to where it had been, and tried to bury the blood and guts left behind.

There was a sobering lesson about this lion. A few weeks after we returned home, we heard that a man, camping not far from here, had been killed by a lion. The man had left his roof top tent in the middle of the night, and the lion attacked.

A lion who kills a human has to die, and so it was shot. I believe, though I can’t be sure, that it was this lion. It had become habituated to humans and vehicles. We had sat in our vehicle and watched her. We were part of the reason she was unconcerned about humans invading her world; the reason she didn’t steer clear of the campers; the reason she attacked; the reason she was killed.

On our penultimate day a sandstorm blew up in the afternoon.

We hadn’t seen any elephants all day which was unusal.

The flash flood starts to enter a wide part of the valley. Our vehicle is on the right.

It was incredibly hot that evening. We could hear thunder and saw lightening on the distant mountains.

In the morning we met a guide from one of the lodges, who told us a flash flood was making its way down the valley. If we remained, we would have been cut off.

The guide said the elephants had left a couple of days previously – did they sense the flood? The same thing happened the previous year – the elephants had left the valley just before a flash flood. Baby elephants are in danger of being swept away in fast flowing flood waters.

Some of the other wonderful creatures inhabiting the Hoanib Valley