A visitor!

You will never believe what happened this morning! I was woken by a tremendous noise which at first I thought was thunder, but then as it became a regular beating I realised it was something battering on the front gate. I leapt out of bed, and woke up Tracy…it was 6am and just starting to get light. Our first thought was that it was someone trying to get in, but apart from the fact that no-one has ever visited us at 6am before, the sound was just too loud to be being made by a human…unless he was attacking the gate with a battering ram! We found the keys and unlocked the front door, and went outside to see if we could make out what it was – we were going to call over the gate, we're always a bit wary of opening it when we can't see who is out there, especially if they sound as if they are armed with half a tree in each arm!

As we got nearer to the gate however, we could see where whatever it was had been hitting the gate with considerable force – there was a big dent and the metal was buckling. As we stood there the thing rammed into the gate again and the whole right-hand gate moved…we could see daylight between the two gates. At this point we retreated round the back of the house and I was seriously regretting not bringing my phone out with me…and in fact being outside in my pyjamas! I also wished I had brought the back door key out with me…now we had moved to the back of the house, we were too scared to go back round to the front door, in case whatever it was came in. Tracy had also grabbed hold of Dachanger Clive because he has a tendency to make a mad dash for the gate when it is open, and we weren't convince it was going to stay shut for much longer!

And we were right! Suddenly with an almighty crash the bolt gave way and the gate swung open…and standing in the gap was the most enormous elephant I have ever seen! I haven't even seen an elephant since I got here…let alone one this big! And there was no way we were going to be able to stop it marching into the garden. Once I had got over the relief of it not being an army of men with a big log come to throw us out of our house, it was really quite a magnificent sight. Now it had head-butted its way through the obstruction it moved pretty slowly and calmly (though I guess when you are that big its difficult to do otherwise). It walked nonchalantly into the garden and started to eat whatever it could lay its trunk on…which really wasn't an awful lot, seeing as Dachanger Clive has already devoured most of the garden! As it moved towards us, we moved around the back of the house and down the other side, and back round to the front, where we could get back inside the front door and lock it…just in case! On this occasion Dachanger was allowed inside the house – having spent all week trying to persuade him that this was not the case! At this point I rang Nathan to find out what on earth we were meant to do, while Tracy kept a close eye on our friend out the back! He said there really wasn't a lot we could do, except wait for it to leave – in the meantime he would call the local wildlife official, who would see about getting rid of it from the area. So we waited, and after a while, it seemed satisfied that it had eaten everything it fancied and trampled the stuff it didn't fancy…meanwhile I had got some fantastic video coverage – perhaps I'll see if I can get some onto this blog…not got high hopes though as computer has trouble recognising video camera. Then it wandered nonchalantly back out of the garden, like it had had every right to be there in the first place! And we were left wondering who was going to fix our gate! Now that is something I never predicted happening while we were here – apparently it isn't a regular occurrence by any means – Nathan says that this particular beast must have wandered down from the hills – maybe even from the Congo…he's only ever known it happen once before! We were obviously just…er…lucky!