Where to see the African Elephant in South Africa

Elephants are the easiest of the Big Five to find and the most rewarding to sit with. They need a great deal of water and even more food, so in the dry season they are tied to rivers and waterholes and they move in daylight, which is the opposite of most big game. Addo Elephant National Park in the Eastern Cape is the surest place in the country: it was fenced in 1931 around the last eleven elephants of the Sundays River valley and now holds more than six hundred in thicket that has never stopped feeding them. Kruger, the Lowveld private reserves, Tembe in northern KwaZulu-Natal and the Tuli and Chobe systems on the northern borders are the others.

May to September concentrates them at water. In the green summer they disperse into the bush and are harder to find but far more pleasant to watch, with new calves in the herds. Addo is the exception to the season rule: its waterhole in front of the main camp works all year, and it is malaria-free, which makes it the usual choice for families.

Pair elephants with the thicket restoration story of the Eastern Cape, a Lowveld Big Five reserve, or the desert-adapted elephants of the Namibian river valleys for the same animal living a completely different life.