Day 648 - CAUTION: ELEPHANT

We spent the morning hanging out around camp, reading under the trees and doing some exercise (well, you can guess who did what!). The peace, quiet and solitude here is kind of addictive - we didn't want to do anything to disrupt it. It's nice to be able to recharge our batteries that were sapped during our Indian adventures.

This relaxed morning soon turned to afternoon and our intention was to do the small 1km walk that we missed yesterday to find somewhere nice to have lunch. Somehow we managed to diverge onto a nearly 4 hour trail which once again took us through open pine forest and deep jungle terrain. Where's Liv ... ?It also provided a near death experience as well as some intense excitement ...

Over the past few days we kind of laughed at the Caution Elephant signs posted everywhere, but were desperately hoping we'd get to see some of these majestic creatures in their wild habitat. Our wishes were granted quite early on in our hike as we suddenly came across a lone elephant eating her way through her lunch right in the middle of our trail. We slowly crept our way closer for a look, but her massive ears gave her the heads up that we were there and she bolted for the bush. Spurred on by the initial excitement of our encounter we decided to track her, which wasn't too had considering she left a trail of broken trees and rising dust in her wake. When we finally caught up with her we got more than we bargained for: not only was she joined by 2 other females and a big daddy elephant bull, but there were also 3 babies protectively encased between the shear mass of their parents. This should have been warning enough to stay at a distance, or even smarter would have been to leave them to their peace. But something inside us just wanted a closer look - yes, we know, this sounds so stupid, but we're from NZ and we don't have any wild animals like elephants there, and the only big animals we see are caged which strips our natural fear of them away.

Anyway, we were enjoying our vantage point of about 10m (Adam) - 20m (Liv) from the elephants when the elephant bull unexpectedly turned, stared right at Adam and took offence to his proximity before raising his trunk, and sounding his aggression as he charged our way!
A loud "shit! run!" came from Adam and we were soon running for our lives!! This was pretty difficult considering we were on a cliff edge and as opposed to the elephant who could just barge his way through the jungle growth we had to weave our way through. This was made even worse by the vines as thick as a baby's arm completely covered with razor sharp spikes just begging to puncture silly little humans that comes its way! And that's just what it did as Liv attempted a deadly leap over the vine (on the way in Adam had calmly held the said vine down while Liv climbed over) which resulted in puncture wounds to the feet and a stunt-like tumble that could have been the end had the bull not given up his chase!

And so ended our elephant adventure. We slowly made our way back to the trail, as the adrenaline depleted from our bloodstream the shakes and reality of the past few minutes set in and we realised how lucky / stupid we were! It took some time to decide whether we should retreat to the safety of our camp or continue our hike, but we were soon back on the trail and cautiously taking in all the signs of elephants around us - every little sound made us stop and we hoped we wouldn't encounter one of the bears we'd heard the night before - goodness know what we'd do - probably try to give it a hug: bears are friendly aren't they?!

We made it to the Poo Kor view point where we sat down to lunch with both Nam Nao and Pukadung National Parks stretching out before us, as well as Phu Pa Jit Mountain - the highest in this area. Adam climbed the lookout tower before realising the time, and the fact that we had another couple of hours walk through wild elephant infested jungle until we got to the safety of camp.
On the way back we started to realise how safe it is walking in NZ - here we came across a colony of fire red ants that took bites at us as we passed, a spider as big as Ethan's fist, a couple of snakes, not to mention the afore mentioned pack of charging elephants - so many things out to get us that we can't wait to walk (naked if we wanted) through NZ's forests!

We set in for another sunset and night in the protection of our tent.

Adlibing an elephant attack.