Tourist cheats death as elephant tips canoe, sinks her in murky water in Botswana

A serene sightseeing trip through one of Africa’s most celebrated wetlands took a harrowing turn when a charging elephant flipped two canoes carrying tourists from Britain and the US, sending them into crocodile-infested waters.

The incident took place on Sept 27 in Botswana’s Okavango Delta.

A video that has since circulated widely online shows four tourists being poled slowly on dugout canoes, known locally as makoros, on a marshland where a herd of elephants is grazing.

The canoes, however, drift too close to a cow and her two calves.

A bull then emerges from the reeds and surges towards the canoes, striking them with its trunk and tusks.

The boats tip over, plunging the tourists into the water.

The elephant appears to retreat. But a second video shows it returning to knock one of the tourists, a woman, underwater.

It pushes her into the water with its trunk. Fortunately for her, the water is murky and the bull misses hitting her with its tusks and crushing her with its legs.

She escapes serious injury only after the animal moves off with its herd.

According to witnesses, the guides who had been steering the canoes towards the animals abandoned their passengers and ran for the safety of the riverbank.

“She was incredibly lucky,” a former South African game ranger who reviewed the footage told the Daily Mail. “Had the elephant held her down for a few more seconds, or gored her with its tusks, the outcome would likely have been fatal.”

The tourists eventually made it to shore, shaken but alive.

Camera equipment and phones were lost, according to staff at local tour companies, though all four visitors were able to walk away.

“It’s a blessing nobody was badly hurt,” said a receptionist at one safari operator, according to the Daily Mail. “But wild animals can be very unpredictable.”

The Okavango Delta, a Unesco World Heritage site, is famed for its elephants, whose population in Botswana is the largest in Africa.

Such encounters, while rare, are not unheard-of.

In July, another elephant charged a boatload of British tourists in the delta, nearly overturning their vessel.

Two months earlier, in neighbouring Zambia, a protective cow elephant killed two women from Britain and New Zealand who were on a walking safari.

Botswana is home to roughly 130,000 elephants, part of a continent-wide population estimated at 415,000.

While revered as symbols of African wilderness, elephants kill hundreds of people each year, most often when humans venture too close to mothers with calves.