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CURIOSITY

A five elephant's trip on a kenyan tarmac road

Unusual relocation from Laikipia to Mau forest

21-07-2019 by Freddie del Curatolo

It's usually a matter of water. 
Or even tastier leaves and softer green branches to collect with the trunk and chew.
Of course, females can also be a good reason to move from one area to another in the place where you were born and raised.
Because elephants are not really nomads, but a few strolls do it willingly, in search of better living conditions.
What's unusual is that in order to change the living and reproduction area, they choose the paved road and, with great tranquillity, in group, they get into the busy hairpin bends, dribbling cars and trucks, to enter from one forest to another of the Rift Valley.
It happened in Laikipia County, at the gates of the Mau forest, when five male elephants, quite young, came out of one of the many dirt roads of the plateau north of Nairobi, and without even giving precedence they crossed, united and with a decisive step, the provincial road that crosses the Mau forest. A road that is certainly more comfortable and faster, than getting between steep slopes full of pitfalls, including the landslides of the mud in this period of scattered rains.
Of course, for truck drivers and travelers "on the road", seeing them arriving at first glance must not have been a joy. There were also many people on foot, who preferred to stand at the edge of the road, ready to take refuge behind the tall trees that surround the paved road.
Many others turned off their engines and stopped the vehicles to let them pass, pulling over to take pictures with their mobile phones.
Images that in a short time have invaded the social profiles of hundreds of Kenyans, while the Kenya Wildlife Service rushed to "gently guide" the five huge friends to their new, temporary promised land.
Spiritual jokes, invitations to get them to the capital and so on. Because virtually a ton and a half of zannuto animal certainly does not arouse fear, but when it knocks with its trunk out of your house and you go to open, maybe before taking a selfie and commenting on it think about it an attimino.
Let's hope then that the elephants don't start to get our taste and that they continue to prefer the off-road and adventure, to the rapid movements along the national roads. Surprise and spectacle aside, they have little respect for the highway code, they can become more irritable than a Milanese on the ring road and rarely put the arrow.

TAGS: elefanti kenyalaikipia kenyastrade kenyacuriosità kenya

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