Looking For The Rhino

Friday 19 april

Our guide works for Wilderness Safaris, the organization that runs the Desert Rhino camp. They work closely with trackers for the Save The Rhino Trust (I think that’s the name), and the trackers try to follow a small number of black rhinos across a huge area. The animals do not have radio collars; they’re just out there in the vast open space.

So it’s not surprising that the nine of us in our Land Cruiser and another vehicle with two guides, in radio contact with the trackers, spent many hours driving around in search of a rhino. The landscape looks like this, sometimes hillier, as far as you can see:

We had a fine picnic lunch, then hit the very off-road again. By mid-afternoon, we were given a choice of continuing or going back to camp, by now a couple of hours away. Immediately after we reluctantly chose to return, the trackers radioed that they had a rhino in sight, so we stuck to the search. About an hour later, we were rewarded with a male rhino down the hill:

And with the help of zoomage, you can see that it’s the real thing:

Rhinos have excellent hearing, and this guy knew that a dozen (awed and very quiet) people were watching him. He turned and headed uphill, which really frightened everyone looking at him through binoculars, but he lost interest and we were sent back to the vehicles for the long bumpy drive back to our comfortable camp.