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The next 2 rows are from a campsite across the river from South Luangwa park in Zambia. I think I saw just as much wildlife in the campsite as in the park. The first night there I came across a few people shining a flashlight on a spitting cobra. I don't know much about snakes but this seemed liked a rather dim idea to me. The same night a walk down to the river was blocked by a number of hippos...which I'm told is the animal that kills the most people in Africa. This may be why we were warned specifically and repeatedly not to walk down to the river at night.

The next night I was awakened by someone shaking my tent, as were Paul (tent about 4 ft from mine) and Kate&Jake (tent about 4 ft from Paul's). As I was getting out to investigate, I heard the sound of a tent ripping. I think everyone immediately thought of the stories of people slicing tents open at night to steal things, and things such as "who's there?" and "go away!" were coming out of the other tents. By this time I'd gotten far enough out my tent to realize that it had been a full sized elephant walking between the tents that had woken us up. Paul's the lucky one though, when he tells the story he gets to add the bit where the elephant puts a tusk through his tent when it tried to turn around, a bit better than my "it brushed against my tent". Lucky bastard. Who am I kidding, 3 months from now it will have been my tent. 6 months after that I'll have grabbed the elephant by the tusks and wrestled him to the ground saving everyone's life.

I figure it's pretty likely it was one of the elephants standing behind me in the picture. It was taken about 2 hours after the encounter.

These last ones are from inside South Luangwa. The park guide pointed out one young elephant without tusks, and claimed that it had evolved to be tuskless so it wouldn't be killed by poachers. I didn't bother to explain that a single individual isn't evolution, especially one who's immediate ancestors had tusks. He is merely a random mutation, and it would only lead to evolution if he and his descendants' chances of living and breeding were better than their fellow elephants, and their tusklessness spread throughout the elephant population. I just took it as one of the many many exaggerations, misinformation and outright lies I was told by supposedly knowledgeable guides.