This elephant attack happened on the first day of our 8-day Safari in Botswana, Chobe Nationalpark, on Friday, August 14th 2015. We landed on the Linyanti Airstrip at 4 pm. We, that's me and my wife and two other couples, friends of ours. Our friends, who have been on several Safaris before, have told me that elephants might sometimes do a mock charge, but would stop in front of the car or just turn away. A guide picked us up in an open Safari Jeep. On the way to the Camp we saw several elephants, that were pretty excited when we passed them and would run away trumpeting. That's why I decided that when we see elephants next time I would take a video rather than a photo, to get the motion and the sounds as well.
At around 5:30 pm we came around some bushes and saw this herd of elephants. They were about 40 to 50 meters away.The guide drove off the sand piste, stopped the car and turned off the engine. Than he explained to us what we saw, "a breading herd of elephants" as you can hear in the video. We watched the heard and about 2 minutes later the matriarch started the attack. Our guide started the engine a second before the impact but it was too late. The tusks of the elephant only missed my body by a few centimeters. The car flipped to the side and we fell to the ground. Luckily the elephant left after the car had fallen. One of our friends, Rosi, got hurt badly, as her husband fell on her. She had two broken vertebras and a big cut on the forehead which I stiched later in the Camp. Fortunately I brought all the stitching equipment with me as I am an orthopedic surgeon.