A Loop around Southern Africa – Day 7: An elephant charges us in iSimangaliso

September 04, 2025

We woke up at our slightly dinghy guesthouse in Bergville at half past six. We had gone to sleep thinking that we would make an early start to visit the rock art under Giant’s Castle, but Joel woke up to a message from a guide he contacted the night before saying that they were closed – there had been a fire near Giant’s Castle last year and the tourist amenities had not reopened yet. Since we did not want to squander our time, we quickly figured out an alternative plan and set off to procure a junk food breakfast from a nearby gas station.

We arrived under Cathedral Peak about an hour and a half later. We paid at two gates: once for park entry and once for some other reason I did not quite grasp (I think we paid twice simply because there were two gates). Our destination was the parking lot under Doreen Falls, which we soon found out did not actually lie under Doreen Falls but a decent hike away. In fact, once we had walked towards the falls for about half an hour, we saw a sign that said they were another four kilometres away and turned back. We reasoned that we still had a long drive ahead of us, had yet to eat lunch, and were due to start a night safari at iSimangaliso at seven o’clock in the evening, so we had very little time to spare.

We arrived in Saint Lucia at half past six, having made some unexpected trade-offs on the way. After waiting for over an hour for our food at a Spur, we had no time to visit the Nelson Mandela Capture Site, which we had put on our itinerary as an interesting but not exactly necessary thing to see en route. When we arrived at the location and realised that we would have to buy tickets and visit the whole museum only to reach the main attraction – the bars that, from a certain perspective, make up Mandela’s face – we turned the car back to the main road. The rest of the journey was not particularly interesting. After several days of driving around South Africa, we had gotten well used to the small bush fires scattered around the countryside, so we did not think them remarkable.

Our night safari was quite an experience. Wrapped in blankets, we zoomed around iSimangaliso in an open vehicle, sometimes reversing at forty kilometres an hour just to save time turning around. For much of the ride, we only saw so-called bush junk: bushbucks, duikers, bushpigs, zebras, and water buffalo. Once we got off the beaten track, though, we came across a family of elephants. There were at least two dozen of them including juveniles and calves, and we disconcerted some of them by driving back and forth so much that one of the elephants charged at us, trumpeting wildly. The guide did not see him at first, as the elephant was almost entirely in the dark, and we escaped a nasty blow by just one or two seconds.

The guide had insanely good eyesight. From perhaps twenty metres away, he spotted a tiny chameleon on a branch, which he brought to us and had us pass around from hand to hand. However, the most memorable sight that night was a leopard lying right on the side of the road. Since moving to Africa, iSimangaliso was the seventh park where I had gone on a game drive but the first where I had seen an actual leopard. We watched the cat lie around before she became irritated by us and slunk off into the bushes.