One of the most amazing experiences (among many) that I had in South Africa last December was our encounter with a large elephant herd. To set the stage, our two vehicles had pulled over for lunch and we had a relaxing bite to eat. Right before we got back into the vehicles, Jaki Good Miller had us line up for a group photo. As she was composing the picture, we all saw this big elephant coming down the road toward us. Jaki thought we were kidding and turned around to see that we were not. We all ran to the vehicle, hopped in and drove off to position ourselves to get some photos of the elephant. Then the amazing happened. As we looked toward the elephant, we saw that there was a herd coming down the mountain. When I say a herd, it was huge. We counted 43 elephants and I am sure that we missed some. They were walking on the other side of this creek and our amazing Rangers thought they would walk across it to the other side where this very small water hole (looked more like a mud hole) was. We positioned ourselves close to the the water hole and hoped that they would come to it. As you can see, they did and while we were shooting some of the of them taking a “bath”, we discovered we were fully surrounded by them. If you are wondering how close we were to them, I shot this at around 50mm, which is akin to a person’s normal eyesight. So very close. Some of them walked by the sides of the vehicles, and, if I had reached out, I would have come close to touching them. Just another day on safari in South Africa.