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Shares
It was a chilly morning when we left our lodge, which had once been a fort, in Sesfontein, a small village in North-Western Namibia, to go on a typical African adventure, a safari. No more than an hour from dawn we got on our 4x4 cars, along with our well-equipped guides, and began our journey. It was winter at the time, but that didn’t mean it was extremely cold, quite the opposite. We stopped after a while to witness one of the best moments of any day, sunrise. We had seen the sun set over the Brandberg mountain just a couple of days earlier and now we welcomed it back, fearlessly emerging from behind another mountain, its rays slowly reaching us, flooding the whole landscape with light and warmth. We stopped again for a quick breakfast surrounded by nothing but nature, grassland as far as the eye could see. Shortly after, the real reason we had decided to go on a safari, the search for a rhino in its natural habitat, began. We spent hours wandering around the area, looking for tire tracks, a sign of the passage of the rhino trackers, who had gone out the night before to start the quest. We stopped every now and then to listen to our guide telling us everything about the place, from the types of animals we could run into, to the species of plants which had inhabited the area for centuries. At some point, we finally found the trackers. We stopped on a dry land, the only plant living there a few hundred metres away. The guides parked the cars close to each other and invited us to get off. Then we saw it. Behind that lonely tree stood a giant white rhinoceros. - We call her Fat Lady - said one of the trackers, grinning – you can walk closer, just make sure you don’t make too much noise. – As they had previously informed us, rhinos cannot see very well, but their smell and hearing are excellent. We followed their instructions and slowly approached the animal, always keeping a good three hundred meters of distance, and started taking some pictures. The animal was still, as if posing for our photos, only moving its ears every now and again. And then it happened. All of a sudden it started moving from behind the plant. “Great, now we can take even better pictures!” everyone thought. Everyone but Fat Lady. In a split second, quick as I never knew rhinoceroses could be, she started galloping. Towards us. - Run! - was the only world I heard clearly, just before the general chaos. We all sprinted as fast as we could towards our cars. Usain Bolt’s record was probably smashed by some of us that day. Once I finally reached the car and got on it, I took my first look back. My heart pounding in my chest. Rhinoceroses can reach a speed up to 55 km/h, humans at their finest just 45. Still breathless I surprisingly found out that the others were all doing fine, the trackers and our guides were laughing at the top of their lungs and the rhino was running away in the opposite direction. I shortly realized they had scared it away with some shouts and rocks, which I didn’t hear in the general confusion. - It’s not the first time this has happened – said our guide – you have lived a true African experience! – On our way back we were still processing what had happened. We had been charged by a rhino and despite the distance between us, if it hadn’t been for the trackers, she would have most definitely reached us. The day went on as planned, we stopped for lunch and a couple other times for some other explanation by our guide and then, just as it had emerged, the sun set behind some distant hills. Once we got back to our lodge and said our goodbyes to the trackers and guides our adrenaline-filled experience was settling in our minds. We went to our rooms to prepare for dinner like any other night, but deep down we all knew that day wasn’t something we would have forgotten easily.