Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa — Blame it on Babar.

Decades of reading the cheerful, heartwarming tales of Celeste, Babar and their offspring have made us adore elephants. Despite their size, elephants seem cute. Watch a documentary of baby elephants trying to mimic adults and these huge, lumbering creatures seem downright cuddly. Add to that haunting documentary scenes of elephants mourning their dead and you can see why people want to get close to them.

Addo Elephant National Park (ENLARGE)
Elephant calves travel in the safety of the herd.
Addo Elephant National Park (ENLARGE)
Elephant herds of all sizes are free to roam the 1.2-million-acre park, one of South Africa's top public game parks.
Addo Elephant National Park (ENLARGE)
One lure of Addo Elephant National Park is the promise of seeing animals up close.
ddo Elephant National Park (ENLARGE)
If you're looking for lions, you won't find many (about half a dozen) in this park.
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At South Africa's Addo Elephant National Park, we discovered you can get closer to elephants than you might wish, and at bargain prices.

On our first morning driving our car through the park, binoculars in hand, tense with anticipation, we saw no elephants. My eye roved across hillsides thick with acacia trees and scrubby grass, hunting for dark gray moving shapes but seeing none. Where are the elephants? I wondered impatiently.

We rounded a corner to find the road strewn with torn branches and piles of fresh elephant dung. The only car on what suddenly felt like a lonely road, we slowed to a crawl. An elephant as big as a house loomed in front of us, ears flapping, shrieking loudly. She looked as if she could crush our car with one foot. Behind her were six others, including a baby, blocking the road. Not sure what to do, we backed up, shut off the car and tried not to breathe.

After hunting these creatures for hours, they were now just feet from our car. We prayed they wouldn't squash us.

For half an hour we were near enough to see their wrinkles. We were alternately thrilled and frightened, watching the elephant family's antics. Two boisterous smaller elephants were mock-fighting, shoving each other and swinging their trunks wildly like reckless teenagers, close to our rear-view mirror. After a bit, the mother decided we weren't a threat and the teenagers stopped their play. Eventually, the group moved off the road and into the bush. We were sorry to see them go and thoroughly hooked on the adrenaline rush of seeing them up close.

Addo is one of South Africa's top public game parks and a great place for a cheap, do-it-yourself safari. Guests spend the night in safari tents or comfortable bungalows and wander during the day on park roads, spotting game. While private game lodges charge $350 to $1,000 per person per day, our chalet with kitchen at Addo cost $85 per night for two. The national parks are bargains, especially for families.

Besides driving around the park in a rented car, guests can sign up for guided game walks, horse trails and day and night game drives in Land Rovers. They can cook their own meals or eat in the park's child-friendly Hapoor Restaurant, named after a dominant bull elephant that lived at the park for decades.

For afternoon dips, the main camp has a swimming pool with a waterfall and a mosaic elephant design on the bottom. There is also a water hole that is floodlit at night, so guests can watch animals come to drink.

You can see animals up close, but this is no zoo. The 420 or so elephants are free to roam through the 1.2-million-acre park. It's the humans who are behind the fences, but only in camp. On park roads, animals can cross your path at any time.

Besides elephants, the park has the rest of the "big five" — rhinos, lions (although just half a dozen), leopards and buffalo. There are also zebras, warthogs, bat-eared foxes, honey badgers, meerkats, antbears (African aardvarks), bush pigs, kudu, jackals, gemsbok and lots of impala.

Addo isn't the only place to see elephants — there are five other public big game parks in South Africa with elephants. The biggest numbers are at Kruger National Park near Johannesburg, home to more than 12,000 elephants. But Addo is easy to get to and see in a few days, has enough other game to make it highly rewarding and has a lovely camp.

"Addo is more intimate and has better accommodation than Kruger," one visitor wrote in a recent discussion forum on Addo's Web site.

We drove to Addo from our home in Cape Town, about 500 miles. The park is an hour from Port Elizabeth, a coastal city with pleasant beaches where you can see Southern right whales between July and November.

The drive from Port Elizabeth looked like the Western United States, with distant blue mountains, orange dirt roads, green farmers' fields and hills covered with scrubby brush. We checked into our "chalet," a stucco house with a tall thatched roof and French doors that opened onto a slate porch with a view of rolling hills. As we unpacked our car, the sun was setting, bathing the row of neat chalets in ochre light.

Our chalet consisted of one large room decorated with matching curtains and bedspreads, with a well-equipped little kitchen at one end. We had a table and chairs, a couch that could become a double bed, two single beds put together as a king and a tiled bathroom with a separate shower and tub.

Each chalet is a respectable distance from the next one, tucked among the bushes near the game fence. All are near the center of camp, with the pool, restaurant and lit water hole for the animals.

We had brought a cooler filled with groceries and ate a home-cooked meal by candlelight on the porch of our bungalow, listening to animal cries in the dark.

Our first morning, after meeting the rowdy elephant group, we ticked off plenty of other animals. We saw red hartebeests, named because the males have horns that curl in a heart shape; handsome gray kudus with what look like white paint drips spilling down their sides; Burchell's zebras with black, white and shadowy brown stripes; and steppe buzzards, huge birds that migrate to Addo from Russian. There were ostriches galloping through the bushes, black-backed jackals near the road and herds of elephants of all sizes on the hillsides.

On each of our three days, we spent hours driving along park roads, stopping at water holes to watch elephants, zebras and impalas drinking. We carried bird and animal identification books to match pictures to the real things.

Some people who visit Addo take a horseback ride into a remote section of the park to view animals.

The camp itself was lively, with vervet monkeys in a tree and a lone kudu that showed up just beyond our fence one afternoon. On our way to the restaurant, we would stop at a bird hide to watch dozens of beautiful plush red bishop birds and small yellow weavers building complicated nests. Each night, we would sit under brilliant stars at the water hole, which was lit up almost like a stage.

Animals didn't seem to mind the lights, and would make shadowy entrances from the left or right as the hushed audience sitting above them would whisper: "Look, a jackal coming up." Our biggest reward, literally, was a large rhino who stayed for about 15 minutes one night before lumbering away.

On our second night, we signed up for a drive in an open Land Rover. Our guide carried a spotlight, which he used to scan the bushes in search of the eyes or spots of animals. He would stop the truck and explain how owls fly as a spotted owl flapped its wings in the light, or point out shiny black dung beetles rolling balls of elephant dung down the road. We saw a herd of mean-looking Cape buffalo perfectly silhouetted in our headlights.

At one point, a family of about a dozen elephants blocked the road and the matriarch mock-charged the Land Rover, just as the elephant had challenged us a day earlier. This time, it was more exciting than scary, with company beside us and an expert to explain that this is normal behavior.

On our last night, we sat outside to search for the kite-shaped Southern Cross. We raised glasses of South African shiraz and gave thanks to the elephants, jackals and warthogs beyond the fence.

IF YOU GO

When to go

Anytime is good, but December through February is the hottest and most crowded period because it's South Africa's summer. The cooler months of March through November are best, because there is less vegetation to obscure the animals.

Getting there

Delta Air Lines and partner South African Airways fly direct from Atlanta to Johannesburg, with connections to other cities. Check the SAA Web site, www.flysaa.com, for flights to Port Elizabeth; expect to pay about $1,700. If you want to visit other cities, try Kulula Air, www.kulula.com, for cheap flights inside South Africa.

Getting around

It's best to rent a car. Avis, Hertz, Budget and National all rent cars at major airports. Prices start at about $200 per week for a manual compact. Gas costs the equivalent of $2.75 per gallon. Driving is on the left, but with a little practice before you leave the airport parking lot, it's easy to master. You'll pay extra for automatic transmission, but it's worth it if you're unfamiliar with manuals. Roads are good to excellent.

Where to stay

The air-conditioned chalet we stayed in costs $85 per night for two adults or $102 for two adults and two children. A luxurious guesthouse with two bedrooms and two bathrooms costs $250 for four people and has nice touches like art and baskets in the rooms. Rondavels, simple huts with bathroom, fridge and communal kitchens, cost $95 per night for two and are in a prime spot overlooking the water hole. A forest cabin with four beds, one bathroom, a fridge and communal kitchen costs $59 for two or $75 for a family of four. Safari tents with fans, communal kitchens and bathrooms cost $43 for two. Camping costs $17 for two. You can find more information, check availability and reserve online at www.addoelephant park.com.

If a cheap safari isn't for you, try the lavish Gorah Elephant Camp, www.gorah.com, a five-star accommodation inside the park. The cost is $380 to $652 per person per night, depending on the season. The camp has tented suites, guided game drives and gourmet food.

Other costs

The daily park entrance fee for foreigners is $13.50 for adults and half that for children. Guided game drives in a Land Rover cost $23.75 per person for a day drive or $27 for a night drive. Horse trails cost $18.50 for a two-hour trip.

Currency

ATM cards are the easiest source of South African rands, as long as your bank is part of an international network. Banks, foreign exchange outlets and hotels will cash traveler's checks, but they are not widely accepted elsewhere. The most recent exchange rate is about 6.85 rands to the dollar.

Other national parks

Kruger National Park, five to six hours from Johannesburg, is South Africa's biggest and most famous park, with more than 4,000 tourist beds. The 200-mile-long park has thousands of animals, including 12,000 elephants.

Hluhluwe and Umfolozi, neighboring parks about three hours from Durban, are smaller but have lovely scenery and rich game, including giraffes and wild dogs. You won't see those at Addo.

You can see desert elephants (if you're lucky) at Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in the Kalahari Desert, a national park bordering Botswana that is only for the hardy because of its long distances and extreme climate.

Hluhluwe and Umfolozi are online at www.kznwildlife.com and Kruger and Kgalagadi are online at at www.sanparks.org.