I kicked a piece of wood to chase away any scorpions or snakes that might be hiding in it, and then reached down to pick up the dry, sandy piece of wood.
Ouch!’
An unexpected pain shot into my middle finger! I jerked my hand back and looked at the back of the piece of wood. No scorpion, but I had grabbed a large thorn that had been hiding on the back of a Knob Thorn branch. Knob THORN! I looked at the little thorn. There was still a broken thorn in the flesh, smiling at me nastily. ‘Fuck, it’s really deep inside! What a way to start!’ I grumbled and pulled the piece of wood out of the undergrowth onto the path anyway. ‘Now more than ever!’
‘Most accidents happen when collecting firewood. People reach into thorns, drop dead wood on their heads or are attacked by scorpions and snakes. So be careful!’ Dylan had said a few minutes ago, when he gave us the task of collecting firewood for the campfire, with his rifle in his left hand – while watching over us.
I had just arrived in the wilderness, in the bush of a Big Five reserve in the KwaZulu-Natal area, and now the first of two weeks of ‘Trails’ was about to begin. I have to admit, I was excited! It would be a strenuous, hot and very cold week, with some borderline experiences and little sleep. It was repeatedly hinted that it should be ‘raw’ and hard. ‘Raw’ but also very beautiful and full of great experiences that will be hard to beat in terms of uniqueness.
The next week was about gaining experience, i.e. hours of walking and animal encounters for the trail guide. At least fifty hours of walking and ten animal encounters were required, at a certain maximum distance – I was very excited! The direct, unmediated encounters with the wilderness were an essential part of my exploration of the wilderness! The coming days were therefore very important, but I was looking forward to being in nature and I couldn’t wait to finally escape the permanent road noise of the camp in Kuleni. I longed to have only the sounds of birds, insects and other animals around me, looked forward to the smells and, of course, breathtaking sunsets and sunrises – because they were already magnificent at Bhejane Camp. But most of all, I was looking forward to close, face-to-face encounters with animals, to amazing impressions and experiences, and I was looking forward to a lot of direct, ‘living’ knowledge from Dylan.
But I was also very curious to see how I would deal with the ‘raw’ and perhaps even borderline situations that had been announced.
‘It should be enough if you only take one pair of shorts with you,’ Dylan had said on Friday afternoon when the upcoming week in the wilderness was announced spontaneously and very unexpectedly for me. “Furthermore, you need a capacity for at least three litres of water per day, because it can get very hot. Oh yes, and during the night from Thursday to Friday we will sleep completely in the open air, on the bare ground, and by an open fire. Most of you probably won’t get a wink of sleep then, that’s why it was put on Thursday,’ Dylan added, taking a casual sip from his coffee cup.
As is typical for South Africans, no great fuss was made about this information, which was almost casually thrown out of the sleeve. Yet this was about nothing less than moving with a maximum of light luggage for five days to an absolutely rudimentary camp in the middle of a five-game reserve, i.e. a reserve that has the status of ‘dangerous game’ for ‘dangerous animals’. According to Dylan, this makeshift camp offered neither electricity nor mobile phone reception, no running water and certainly no hot water. We should therefore pack as lightly as possible, since we would be carrying most of our equipment with us for the next week and we would be walking a lot. Actually, exclusively. For the whole five days.
I knew that such an event was coming up as part of the Trails Guide training and I had been really looking forward to this time from the start. It’s just that I hadn’t expected it so soon and certainly not with such a short lead time of 54 hours! In fact, we only had a net of one and a half days to buy any possible supplies that we might need. Purification tablets for river water, for example. Much of the recommended stuff was not available in the next town of Hluhluwe. So if you didn’t have it by now, you just had to do without it.
On Friday at noon, after the briefing, a mixture of anticipation, enthusiasm and displeasure had spread in me. Mainly because I was pushed quite hard out of my comfort zone: As a notorious planner, I like to have early knowledge and then some lead time to prepare intensively for the event. This was no longer possible here. The only thing I could do was to quickly revise my shopping list again (cereal bars instead of toast) and otherwise find creative solutions to the problems.
Rough wilderness
‘Ready? It’s going to be rough! But nice!’ Wian called to me through the window of the white minibus that he had just parked in front of the community building on Monday morning – and thus increased my tension even more. I was ready! Ready for the bush and ready for five days of ‘survival experiences’! In my mind’s eye, we were already fighting for survival, armed only with knives, full of suffering and hardship. What made my imagination crumble a bit, though, was that most of my fellow students didn’t seem to be quite as fit. If it worked for them, then it shouldn’t be quite as hard. When I think about it, I could imagine that just this predominantly ‘unfit mass’ could be the real yardstick for the words ‘it’s going to be rough and tough’. Then it should be rather relaxed. On the other hand, the South Africans were sometimes unexpectedly tough. So I could be very wrong – and was very excited. Anyway, the wilderness could come for me. But I also had a bit of a guilty conscience, because I had brought more than was absolutely necessary. My wool cardigan, for example. In order not to attract attention, I had smuggled it onto the bus under my green Bhejane fleece and now watched the others as they heaved their stuff onto the bus. HIEVTEN! Because I wasn’t the only one who brought more stuff. Kyle, for example, had a huge suitcase and even a whole camp bed with him. Others came with all sorts of bags and some had even tucked their large sleeping pillows under their arms.
After most of us had stocked up on litres of colourful energy drinks, we finally rolled out of the compound and onto the rough road at around 7 a.m. I had switched my phone to flight mode to conserve as much battery power as possible, but I was obviously the only one who gave it a thought. Because we hadn’t driven a kilometre before everyone was already engrossed in their phones again, listening to music with thick headphones, watching films or even playing computer games. I was puzzled. Either the others’ phones had a huge battery and everyone had a huge power bank with them – or maybe it was quite different than announced and there was maybe electricity after all?
I let my thoughts drift away from the mobile phones and the behaviour of the others and let my gaze wander over the passing scenery. It felt so good to be on the road! I watched the world around me, which was new to me, and enjoyed discovering new things, when something seemed strange to me: we were driving. And driving. And driving. Wasn’t the camp supposed to be in the wilderness of iMfolozi Park? The park where Tom had invited me on Sunday? It was just around the corner and could be reached in just under 35 minutes! But we had already been on the road for an hour and were still driving! ‘I must have missed something again – well, at least I’m seeing more of the area here,’ I thought, looking out of the window again.
The places after Hluhluwe were rather simple. There were concrete huts here, but they were often in a miserable condition, sometimes really rocked and sometimes not even properly finished. Often they had hardly any paint left on the walls, if they had ever had any paint at all. Columns, on the other hand, seemed to be all the rage here. Along the lines of: ‘No matter what state your hut is in, as long as you have two columns at the entrance,’ every second house here had big fat columns installed at the front. Kind of weird.
It was still early in the morning, but already quite busy. Along the road, groups of schoolchildren, obediently separated by gender, were bustling about in neat blue-and-white or purple-and-white school uniforms. In addition to the children, many adults were also out and about in all sorts of attire, from neat suits to swimming trunks, to earn a few rands to make a living. We passed various market stalls selling everything from fruit to reed carpets. The goods were often simply placed on the dusty, grey-yellow ground or next to large, round pots. The pots were placed over a fire, which was fuelled by large, metre-long logs laid in a star shape.
Between the small towns, there was land. This seemed to be a centre of the timber industry. At least there were eucalyptus tree plantations everywhere, lined up like soldiers. Some of the plantations had been harvested and there was only a huge, black, empty field with stubble to be seen. The whole thing reminded me more of an oversized cornfield than a forest. ‘Paper,” explained Chey, Otter’s girlfriend. “Paper is made from the trees.” It makes sense: the trees were super straight, but much too thin for decent timber.
The journey went on and on and I was very curious to see where we would end up when Wian parked the car at 08:45 in a car park at a large mall in Richards Bay: ‘We still have to buy a few things for the week. But we leave punctually at 9:05. If you show up here at 9:10, you won’t find the bus in the car park anymore!” Once again, a clear announcement. Wian loved these announcements.
I rummaged around in my backpack and fished my credit card out of the depths. I had actually considered not taking any money at all – what would I need it for in the wilderness? But now I was glad that I had my card with me after all, because it meant I could buy a good coffee – at Wimpy.
I sat back in the minibus with a large, fragrant cappuccino and slowly started to feel hot. My wool cardigan was to blame. ‘This is getting silly”I thought, thinking of Kyle’s suitcase, and I took the cardigan out from under the fleece. At 9:30 a.m., instead of the announced 9:05 a.m., we continued. The calculation was made without the opening times of the shops, which mostly only opened at 9:00 a.m.
We now drove a short distance on a paved road and then came across a dirt road, a rough, sandy road with large holes and many rough stones, which drastically reduced our cruising speed. ‘It’s only a few more kilometres, but we still need almost an hour,’ Wian shouted to us from the back, his voice shaking from the vibration. We were also shaken around quite a bit and looking at the phone screen was becoming increasingly exhausting, so I concentrated again on the surroundings and on drinking the coffee as accident-free as possible. We now passed huge, hilly sugar cane fields and small, very rudimentary settlements of the Zulu descendants who still lived in these hills.
Inside the car, loud pop music blared from the speakers and my euphoric, good-humoured fellow passengers played one game after another. One game was about naming a term that was related to the one mentioned before. For example, milk and cow. There was a lot of laughter and it looked fun, so I joined in. ‘A bit of socialising and, above all, practising English can’t hurt.’ But Chey, who was before me in the round and threw the terms into the room for me, made it really difficult for me by using very specific technical terms that I mostly didn’t even know. So it wasn’t enough after all. So I disconnected again after the sixth round. That was a bit unfortunate, of course, but I still had a little more time ahead of me.
Welcome to the bush – for real this time
After about an hour on the dirt road, we reached our destination, a reserve adjacent to the large iMfolozi Park. Now we had to dismount and transfer all the luggage to a game drive vehicle that had been provided. After we had all taken our seats on the game vehicle ourselves, the converted, large-engined Toyota carried us unflinchingly and comfortably over hill and dale, up and down, along the rough track. We saw zebras, impalas and kudus, crossed a river with the off-road vehicle and passed a number of black, burnt areas. “Originally, this was a controlled fire. But then the wind carried sparks and now much more has burned than was intended. But don’t worry, the area you’ll be travelling in wasn’t affected by the fire,’ the ranger of the private game park informed us, as if he could read my thoughts, because I had actually just been wondering whether we would be walking around in a post-apocalyptic environment with a strong smell for the next few days.
The off-road vehicle, the engine and the whole body really had to work. ‘This is what real off-road vehicles are built for,’ I thought, you wouldn’t get 100 metres with an SUV here. The ‘road’ was too rough. Every bumper and every attachment had a purpose and had to withstand a lot. Nothing had been added just for the sake of appearances, but had to fulfil its purpose and be extremely resilient in doing so. What counts here is being, not appearance. With this perspective, it would actually also be an interesting motif for a work, I think, just as the terrain changed again.
The colour dominance changed from black to beige. There hadn’t been a fire here either, but it wasn’t much livelier either. ‘It’s always quite dry here in winter. It only starts raining more in summer,’ Tom had told me on Sunday. Everything here was really the opposite of what it is in Europe! The terrain changed again and now the beige was complemented by dull green and rich rust brown. I felt the wind of the open 4×4 on my cheeks, listened to the chirping of birds alongside the deep bubbling of the diesel engine, and watched the vast numbers of reddish-brown impalas that lined the dusty, golden-yellow or rust-coloured path. The colours of the sand, the many shades of steel-grey in the clouds, the blue of the sky, the muted, dull green of the bushes and the yellow of the dry grass. All of this was simply magnificent. I took a deep breath and enjoyed the situation to the full.
I was happy. I had come here for exactly this, for these images, these impressions. What a luxury it was to be here!
After I had inflated my mattress and prepared everything in the tent for the night, I devoted myself to my new portable solar panels. After some tinkering with a strap I had brought with me, I managed to align the panels optimally to the north (here north is the sunny side), so that from tomorrow morning they would be able to absorb a maximum of sunlight. Because there was actually no electricity. I knew the panels worked. I hadn’t yet tested how well, and I was very excited. The construction attracted immediate attention, and my neighbour, Chomp, asked if he could charge his phone with mine. ‘Why not?’ I thought. My power bank was full, so I could see what the panels could do in the afternoon sun and with the clouds passing by. I plugged Chomp’s mobile phone into the solar panels and then turned to my aching finger, because I was slowly losing feeling in the tip of my finger. This was not good!
Poacher boots
‘Everyone line up, facing the tree’, said Dylan after we had met in front of the camp for the first walk, an exploratory walk, after the wood collection and setting up of the camp. The small camp was enclosed by a fence about 2.5 metres high. Within this fence we were safe, could move around freely and also walk around in flip-flops. ‘Outside the fence only with sturdy shoes and a backup – that is, a person with a rifle” was the first announcement when we reached the camp at noon. Of course, the fence was not meant to protect against burglars, but to keep wild animals out. So hyenas, buffalos, leopards, rhinos, elephants and of course the king himself – the lion. Yes, we were here in a ‘Big Five, Dangerous Game Reserve’ and special rules applied here: locomotion only in a ‘train’, i.e. one behind the other. No talking or making any noise. Do not step in front of the riflemen and the most important thing: never run away!
‘Right, now everyone lift your left leg and hold on to your neighbour,’ shouted Dylan, while he whipped out his phone and started taking photos of the soles. I was still curious to see what kind of team-building exercise this was, as at the time I couldn’t see how Dylan was already solving the whole mystery. ‘I take pictures of the soles of your shoes and send them to the anti-poaching unit. If they come across our footprints, they can rule out immediately that these are poachers and don’t waste time on us and our tracks.’
After all the pictures had been sent, we slowly began to move through the undergrowth in the train. Dylan kept stopping to explain the tracks he found in the sand or the origin of various piles of dung and excrement. One track had caught his special attention: the fresh track of a black rhino in the sand and a still-moist pile of dung in the rhino’s typical ‘midden’.
A ‘midden’ is a collection of dung. But it is more than a latrine. A mudden is used to mark out the territory, to mark and to exchange information among each other. A bull, for example, can tell from the smell whether a cow is receptive. It is, so to speak, the ‘Facebook’ of rhinos.
‘Take a closer look at this pile,’ Dylan urged, reaching into a still-damp dung heap. ‘Do you see these small pieces of twig?’ He plucked a small piece of wood out of the dung and held it up. ‘This is the dung of a black rhino. You can tell because it contains twigs that have all been cut at a 45-degree angle.’ A black rhino is a browser and feeds on the branches of shrubs and low trees. They have special molars that allow them to cut the branches at precisely this 45-degree angle. Once you have found a midden with fresh dung, you can follow the tracks in the sand from there and track the animal,‘ Dylan continued, sniffing the dung in his hand. ’Wonderfully aromatic,‘ he said with a grin. ’Typical of black rhino.‘ ’Typical of a ranger,” I thought to myself, also grinning.
We followed the tracks and after a while came across long streaks next to several footprints. ‘The rhino marked this spot with urine and dragged its leg behind it, hence the drag marks. Do you see these small grains here in the sand? These are urine splashes that have become small balls due to the sand,’ explained Dylan, crushing some of the small grains with his fingers. Then he suddenly pricked up his ears and pointed towards the east. ‘Red-billed Oxpecker,’ whispered Dylan, looking eagerly into the bush. The Oxpecker is an important indicator bird, because it is typically always in the vicinity of the Big Five, except for elephants, in order to rid them of pesky parasites.
We listened intently, heard a crackling of branches and saw – a grey rhino! A black rhino – without a horn. It was removed under anaesthesia to protect it from poachers. This procedure is painless for the animal, but very stressful. But it does protect it from poachers. For the most part. Just last week, poachers are said to have killed a ‘dehorned’ rhino nearby in order to get the five centimetres of horn that had grown back. The entire Zulu-Natal area is famous for its relatively high population of white and black rhinos – unfortunately, however, the threat from poachers, who sell the horns to China at exorbitant prices, is also correspondingly high here. It is actually only horn. The same material as your and my fingernails!
We crept cautiously, unnoticed by the rhino, a few more metres closer and were now a good 40 metres away from the animal. I took out my camera and took a few photos. But they didn’t turn out very well. A large part of the animal was hidden behind bushes, I mainly only saw its backside, and besides, the rhino was – hornless. But that was exactly what I wanted to capture with my photos. ‘Still good practice,’I thought to myself and took a few more photos, while Dylan pointed out an anomaly to us: the rhino’s tail was blunt and short. ‘Why is that?’ Dylan whispered to us, only to receive quizzical looks in return. ‘Probably because he was attacked by a predator when he was young and caught by the tail, because rhinos don’t actually have any enemies as adults. Let’s call him STOMPI.’
The wind was favourable, and so we were able to slip away unnoticed from the rhino and continue on our way through the undergrowth when we came across a large hollow in a sandy area. ‘This was probably Stompi’s resting place until just now,’ explained Dylan, showing us how we could come to this conclusion based on the tracks – and how the animal had probably been lying.
‘Sometimes you can find whole or burst ticks in such places, which have come off due to the pressure when lying down.’ We looked more closely with interest, but could no longer see any ticks. ‘OK, there are none here. But what do you see instead?’ Dylan asked and drew a circle in the air over a certain spot. ‘These are fresh bird tracks!’ Otter shouted. ‘Exactly,‘ replied Dylan, visibly pleased. ’The birds probably ate the ticks that were lying here.‘
’Good birds,’ I thought, and we continued our journey quietly and deliberately.
When we emerged from the undergrowth after a few metres onto a large expanse of grassland, golden yellow in colour from the evening sun, my heart swelled. I was full of gratitude and so happy to be here, on foot, in the midst of this nature, overwhelmed by all the impressions! We live on a truly beautiful planet!
As dusk was slowly setting in, we started our way back, but were repeatedly stopped by Dylan, who found all kinds of bones from buffalo, warthogs and kudus and was keen to explain the identifying features and peculiarities to us:
‘Why is this bone lying here all alone?‘ Dylan asked, pointing to a single bone about 40 cm long. ’Maybe hyenas‘, came from the group, “or vultures”. ’Exactly, probably scavengers that dragged the bone around. But it could also have been a porcupine. These animals eat everything. Even meat and carrion, and sometimes just bones. That’s how they get calcium, which they need for their quills,’ Dylan explained.
The way back led us over a hill, through all kinds of red ‘stone land’ and dry tree stumps, and the setting sun on the horizon created a somewhat surreal atmosphere around us.
‘There will be hardly any precipitation tonight,’ Dylan explained, looking up at the sky and clouds. ‘Precipitation always comes when the sky is clear. Then it’s best to lie under trees if you want to sleep outside. These catch some of the precipitation. Remember that for the outsleep on Thursday.’
We reached camp shortly before it got really dark at around 5 p.m., and so we had completed our first hike in the wilderness, covering 6.65 kilometres in three hours. It had been very beautiful and very impressive. But now I was very hungry and looking forward to a good night’s sleep.
After dinner, we had stew cooked over the fire, and then we sang a birthday serenade for Otter, who was celebrating his twentieth birthday, and in return we received delicious chocolate cake – in the bush. I grinned. ‘But not quite so rough here.’After a sweet rooibos tea with a view of the fire, I was finally overcome by tiredness and I retired to my tent.
The tent was great, very robust and relatively large. It was clean, hardly musty and, unlike the hut in Bhejane Camp, completely sealed. I had organised most of my things in zip bags and now had everything sensibly draped around me. My own air mattress was totally comfortable and my sleeping bag cosy. I still knew all this from seatrekking with Arne. This was familiar and therefore good. Only the lying position was… so-so. I was lying a bit sloping and a bit in a hollow back. ‘I hope my back doesn’t mind that. I’ll need it for the next four days’.
I switched off the camping light and listened to the surroundings. No street noise! Wonderful. I was looking forward to the sounds of the night in the bush – when suddenly a lively discussion between two girls in the neighbouring tent began. So, earplugs after all. Well, something was always happening.
