Seeing Savute

During the ten years of my Botswana guiding career I had always arrived in Savuti via the sweat staining dust of the Mababe Depression or the barely-noticed Gocha hills. Every time I approached Savuti was with the excitement of meeting a fantasial lover, hoping each time to get a little closer to her heart.I saw Savuti from the air for the first time fifteen years after I had first got to know the area. It was at the height of the dry season, October, when the earth was yearning, waiting, waiting for a continuation. It was like discovering a magical secret that a lover has kept hidden. Many questions were answered and I began to understand the enigma a little bit better.From the air Savuti is a place of strangeness in October - a vast, dry and seemingly lifeless land, save for the patterns formed by the long-dry channel, hillocks and marsh now lying barren in the landscape. Dotting the landscape are pin-pricks of the season's first sprouting of acacia trees.When driving in the set tourist areas of Savute it is intriguing to wonder where the elephants head to when they move over the sand ridge.Then you notice a flicker of life, grey mounds dot the landscape, hugging the small spots of green. As your eyes become accustomed to the vision below, you notice the elephants in the shade of the green acacias, in a seemingly pathetic attempt to find succor from the October heat.
So this is where the elephants spend their days!