Addo Elephant Park – Backpacking around the World

Addo Elephant Park

Addo Elephant Park was 1,5 hour drive away from Port Elisabeth, and on the way our tour guide stopped at a township and told us about Apartheid and how it affected his live.
He was a “coloured”, which for example meant that he had to live in a designated area and the education-opportunities were bad compared to the education a white person, still better then those of a black person. Out of 10 Rand, 1 Rand would be spend on education for a black person, 3 Rand for a coloured person and the rest would go into educating a white person.

But as we all know, Apartheid-laws are gone so things have changed. The problems are still big in this country and it will take many years to solve them, but its much better then it was before.
My personal feeling is that South Africans are very proud of their country and there is one person everyone is looking up to, and that’s Nelson Mandela. They are going to change the name of Port Elisabeth into Nelson Mandela Bay, with a 25 meter high statue of him at new harbour they are currently building.

But on to the Elephant Park. Unfortunately for us we didn’t get to see a lot elephants and the tour guide told us that it was one of his worst days. Usually visitors end up seeing hundreds of elephants, whereas we only saw about twenty to thirty the entire day. But since it was my first game-drive ever, I didn’t mind at all and was fully satisfied to see Zebras, Antelopes., Giraffes and yes also a few Elephants.
A little advice: When driving around in the park you are not alowed to leave the car, so keep in mind that lots of drinking will fill up your bladder and then you will, just like me, pray for a stop.