麻豆约拍

We used to get wild visitors coming into the camp quite regularly. We’d regularly have mongoose coming around the tents – running across the roof, looking for scraps – even trying to steal stuff off the plates when we ate. The best was when the elephants came into camp. There were a few worrying moments when they wandered very close to equipment we were loading/unloading from our cars (they went where they wanted and there was nothing you could do to stop them!), but the most amazing times were when they would come through camp at night, after everyone had gone to bed.

The tent I stayed in was right beside the river. The elephants would come down and walk along the riverbank, grazing on the bushes. They would squeeze past the tent – shaking the whole thing as they tried to get through a gap between the tent and a large tree – there wasn’t really space for their massive girth. The tree had become shiny on one side where successive elephants had rubbed against it, night after night.

Elephants are incredibly quiet when they move around but when they’re being quiet the noisiest things they do is either eating or farting. At night, you’d often hear the noise of their wind before anything else!

Sometimes when I heard them coming I’d sit on the floor of the tent and peer out under the slightly unzipped door and there’d be full grown elephants, sometimes with calves, just two or three feet away, completely unaware (or not bothered) that I was inside. A couple of elephants did have a bit of a disagreement outside the tent one night, which felt pretty close with only a few layers of canvas between us, but after a quick squeal they trotted off. Getting to see those huge animals right up close were really magical moments.