The whole situation, the camp and the wilderness were not as bad as we had been led to believe.

Yes, there was actually no electricity and no hot water. But there WAS water and since it was stored in huge tanks in the sun, it was not cold, but just not warm. Cooking was done with gas. In theory, gas could also be used for heating, because there was a gas boiler and even photovoltaics. But neither was (yet) in operation, or no longer in operation. Poachers had blown up the photovoltaic system some time ago because the camp also served as accommodation for anti-poachers. However, from my point of view, the washrooms could hardly be described as such. It’s easier to say what was there: there was a toilet and a sink. Cold water came out of the wall. That was it. The toilet didn’t flush, and there was no hygiene. It felt to me like I wanted to wash in one of those condemned houses where I used to play out wild shootouts with paintball ammunition and ‘bad guys’ in training with the police – before the houses were too run-down even for that and were finally demolished.

But it wasn’t bad, because I now saw all of this as a ‘simulation’. A preparation and conscious, ‘gentle familiarisation’ for my later expeditions and the potentially really rudimentary conditions associated with them. With this trick, I could endure almost anything and I was much more relaxed. But maybe my comfort zone had simply already expanded considerably.

Only my lower back, as feared, reported. ‘The hollow back was probably too much for the good guy,’ I thought. I guess I had to tinker with something again.

At 6:30 a.m., we opened the gates and put our boots back into the morning wilderness. We had heard lions roar during the night and Dylan was keen to find them today. I was too and couldn’t wait to meet the ‘king’. Unlike the day before, I had my camera already hung around my neck and attached to the device on my backpack. But I still wasn’t completely happy. Unfortunately, you never knew when you would come across an animal in the bush and releasing the camera from the holder was simply too noisy due to the good Velcro fastener. I tried to make the loop a little bigger so that I didn’t have to open the Velcro at all, but in doing so I exposed a large part of the Velcro on the inside – which now caused the lens cover to come undone. ‘This won’t last for long. It’s not a good solution.’

We wound our way through the dry undergrowth while the morning sky slowly turned red, purple and orange, and when the sun was about to rise, we entered an impressively open, yellow grassy area. In front of us, an unbelievably beautiful view opened up over a valley and onto the rising, now orange sun on the horizon. ‘Find a nice spot and enjoy the sunrise,’ Dylan called to us, and he set his backpack and rifle down by a dry tree, while in the background, a few previously dozing zebras were startled and fled.

I looked for a place that was not so sandy to put down my backpack and sat cross-legged, looking towards the red ball of sun.

‘What was that?’

I looked in shock at my beige, long zip-off trousers, which were now speckled with lots of red, moving little dots. ‘It can’t be… NO!’

Hundreds of tiny red ticks had spread over my legs and were now busily searching for an entrance to my seemingly very tempting skin to feast on my blood. I jumped up and tried to wipe the nasty creepy-crawlies off my trousers. No chance. The beasts were so firmly attached that I apparently had to search for them all individually. ‘Fuck!’

I flicked at a particularly heavily frequented spot and lo and behold, almost all the small ticks flew off my trousers in a large arc. At least! So for the next twenty minutes I was busy flicking ticks of all sizes off my trousers and shoes, but kept finding new ‘nests’ on my trousers – and so I missed the sunrise. ‘If I don’t have a tick tonight, it’s a miracle,’ I grumbled to myself, already seeing myself wasting away from “tick fever” in my mind’s eye. I tried to remember when I had ever come across such a large number of ticks before… Never! Disgusting.

I had finally managed to remove all the ticks, as I continued through the tall, dry grass. I was still paranoid and kept checking my trousers, and sure enough, I kept finding new little red nests on my trousers. At first I was super happy that, unlike the others, I was wearing long trousers, because the beasts seemed to be sitting everywhere in the grasses here and had created veritable colonies. But then I realised that no one else had this problem, but that the legs of the others were noticeably shiny. They, like me, had sprayed themselves well against ticks and mosquitoes. The only thing I hadn’t sprayed were my trousers! Could it be that the material of the trousers attracts the animals? I flicked the last tick off my trousers, took my insect repellent out of my pocket, which I had brought back from Thailand, and sprayed almost half of it onto my trousers and shoes. A sweet, baby-powder-like scent now caressed my nose, but it really seemed to work. Not a single tick found its way onto my trousers. I had learned something new!

Dagger Boy

At around 8:15 a.m., we reached the top of another hill and scanned the tree and bush landscape below us with our binoculars, looking for one of the Big Five. We spotted something big and black on a hill about 400 metres away: a buffalo bull, a ‘dagger boy’!

‘It’s warmer at night and cooler during the day up on the hills, which is why the big animals like to stay up there,‘ Dylan explained as we approached Dagger Boy.

’A good time to approach the animals is in the morning. Not only are they usually very active, but it is often windless. The ground only starts to heat up when the sun is fully up. Since each surface warms up at different rates, land winds arise that would cause the animals to pick up our scent if we approached with the wind. Therefore, always approach against the wind, or when there is no wind,’ Dylan continued.

Ten Of Ten

‘White Rhino or Black Rhino?’ Dylan asked, pointing to a fresh rhino track in the sandy soil. He placed his splayed hand over a single print and explained, ‘White Rhino. White Rhinos are much bigger than Black Rhinos. If the size of my hand indicated the size of the print, it would be a Black Rhino. This print is much bigger than my hand! And it’s a bull.’ Dylan pointed to the well-known drag marks in the sand next to the footprints.

We followed Dylan further along the narrow trail, between green and spiky shrubs, until at around 9:30 am we suddenly heard a cracking sound about 60 metres away. Dylan made a fist with his hand and held it in front of his mouth, the sign for ‘White Rhino’. We stopped and peered into the bushes. Nothing. Dylan made us stay put and crept a few metres forward himself, turned cautiously to us and waved us over to him slowly.

At a distance of about 40 metres, we could now see three huge white rhinos between the bushes. ‘A crash of white rhinos’, Dylan whispered to us and gestured for us to make a note of this in our logbook.

Suddenly the wind changed direction, the rhinos suddenly realised our presence and fled, with loud cracking and crashing of the bushes and trees, deep into the undergrowth.

“Yesterday’s first encounter was a “Ten Of Ten Encounter”, a classified encounter. This means that the tracks of an animal were recorded, the animal was found, a good observation could take place from not too far away and then the animal was left alone again – without it even being aware of the encounter. “This encounter was not so good,” Dylan explained. ‘We don’t want the animals to flee from us in panic. This can also lead to dangerous situations.

Always make sure that there are enough escape options. For you AND for the animal. If, for example, you approach an animal from one side and on the other side there is only a gorge or a similar obstacle, then the only way for the animal to escape may be the path you are currently standing on. This can lead to the impression of an attack, whereupon you may feel compelled to shoot the animal in supposed self-defence. It just wanted to escape. So always think for both sides,‘ Dylan warned urgently.

’How do you avoid surprising and thus dangerous situations in blind spots, for example on a path in the reeds?’ Dylan asked as the surroundings slowly changed into a swampy reed landscape. ‘It’s best to throw a stone or a lump of clay into the reeds and, for once, be a bit louder. That way, any animal in the reeds can see you in good time and flee without being surprised by you and feeling compelled to attack,‘ Dylan explained, adding, ’you can’t see anything in the reeds anyway.”

At around 11:30 a.m., we had our third rhinoceros encounter that day. A ‘rhino crash’ of four animals roamed through the dense reeds, not even forty metres away from us, but this time they remained undisturbed by us. ‘Ten out of Ten’!

We were on a real roll. Most of the time, though, I only saw the animals’ rumps, and often there were a lot of branches between me, the camera and the animal, so I couldn’t take any really great photos even with my telephoto lens. The experiences themselves, though, were great. But it slowly dawned on me: for my subjects, I first had to get closer and second approach them from the front. This, of course, required even more silence, camouflage, good wind conditions, but especially a much smaller group. No, it doesn’t require a group at all. I realised that it was almost impossible for me to take a good photo in this context here. I would have to go back into the bush for my subjects. Alone and at most accompanied by a single rifle carrier.

But that was a long way off. For now, I was here. It was wonderful and I simply put the whole endeavour back into a training context: learning to move in the bush, learning to handle the (photo) equipment reliably and quickly, identifying weak points and, above all, constantly expanding my comfort zone.

cold feet

It had slowly started to get really warm again and we were on our way to a large river to spend our lunch break there. ‘Whenever you go towards the water, you have to be more aware of animals coming towards you on the trail,’ Dylan was telling us, when suddenly, as if scripted, two impalas came sprinting towards us on the animal trail. The animals are basically very harmless, but they are easily frightened and comparable to the deer native to Germany. When they feel threatened, however, they are true jumping champions, so it happened that the two ‘flew’ past us almost horizontally before they disappeared into the undergrowth, loudly ‘complaining’.

We finally reached the refreshing water shortly before noon. The embankment was full of animal tracks of all kinds, but we didn’t see any of the animals themselves here. The river bed was huge, but the water was more like a trickle. It must be impressive here during the rainy season!

It had now reached around 30°C again and when we reached the water and the situation was safe, we pulled our boots off our feet and let our heated feet slide into the clear, cold water of the river with relish. The river was so shallow and had so little water that we didn’t have to worry about hippos or large crocodiles and could fully enjoy the refreshing experience in a monumental setting. After cooling down, I looked for a place under a tree, tapped a bit on the dry grass with a stick to give all sorts of little animals the opportunity to find a new place, and then settled down exhausted in the shade.

After a two-hour powernap, I was just about to put my boots back on at around 2:00 p.m. when Chops told me that I would now continue barefoot in the river. ‘I don’t mind that,’ I thought, lacing my boots together and tying them to the top loop of my backpack. But the refreshingly refreshing path in the river was less relaxing than expected. The sandy bottom was very soft and partly very muddy, almost like the mud of the German North Sea. Although the water cools, but the locomotion was all the more exhausting. I was therefore not the only one who was approaching the announced exit at 3:25 p.m. with motivation when Dylan thwarted our plans! ‘Ahead of us, about 500 metres away, is another Dagger Boy in the water and slumbering,’ whispers Dylan, indicating that we should put our backpacks on a sandbank and follow him quietly along the edge of the shore. In the shadow of the almost three-metre-high reeds, we now approached the Dagger Boy and tried to make as little noise as possible. Not so easy in a flowing river.

At 3:37 p.m., we had come within 150 metres of the buffalo. Now there was no way to hide. If the Dagger Boy were to turn towards us spontaneously, he would definitely recognise us and feel threatened by us. So we broke off. ‘But this counts,’ said Dylan, referring to the count as an ‘encounter’ for the logbook. On the way back to camp, we came across lots of tracks again and Dylan had something to say about almost every one of them. This man really was a walking encyclopaedia!

‘What are these ape tracks?’ he asked, pointing to familiar-looking, small five-limbed prints in the sand in front of us. ‘Baboon,’ ‘Vervet Monkey,’ the students shouted back at him. ‘No guessing! Knowledge,’ Dylan warned, explaining, ‘Baboons have a “B” on the sole of their foot. Velvet Monkeys have a “V.”’ ‘

‘He’s not serious’ I thought and examined the track more closely. It was true! With a little imagination, I could see a ‘B’ in the ball area.

‘Funny’!

At around 4:30 p.m., we found ourselves in a now dried-up stream and were surrounded by meter-high reeds. Dylan had once again gone ahead to secure the difficult-to-see bend ahead of us and was just about to whistle to us with a certain tone sequence when a strong gust of wind passed us, producing an abrupt crashing and raging in the reeds in front of Dylan. Actually, it wasn’t the gust of wind that triggered the commotion, but a herd of about fifty buffaloes, a so-called ‘breeding herd’, which had literally ‘got wind’ of us and was now running for its supposed life forty metres in front of us. Too bad. You could hear a lot, but you could hardly see anything. ‘It counts anyway,’ Dylan said with a grin. That makes six, or seven if you count yesterday afternoon. Not bad for two days!

One of the students suddenly pointed up at three very large birds. ‘Aren’t those vultures, right?’ he asked. ‘Yes, exactly,’ Dylan replied and put on his binoculars to determine the correct species. ‘Does that mean there’s carrion in the reeds?‘ the student asked. ’No. When vultures find carrion, they start circling and spiral downwards like a corkscrew. These are just looking out,‘ replied Dylan, pausing briefly before continuing, ’Did you know that vultures are also hunted by humans?”

We shook our heads in disbelief.

‘Why? There’s nothing to it!’

‘Superstition!’ replied Dylan.

‘There are people who believe that vultures can make contact with the realm of the dead. But above all, some believe that they can see into the future. Because they have to “know” when something dies. That’s why vultures are now killed with poisoned carrion and then talismans are made from their bones. Thanks to the talismans, the chance of winning the lottery supposedly increases.’

‘But that should be recognised as a myth quite quickly,’ I counter somewhat sceptically.

‘It is a myth,’ Dylan replies.

‘Fucking humans,’ I thought. Especially when you consider that vultures only raise a single chick per year.

Everything was purple-red when we entered the gate to our ‘enclosure’ again at around 5:30 pm. ‘Not bad,’ I thought as I looked at my watch, which I had used to track today’s route. We had actually been on the road for almost 11 hours, but had only covered around 13.5 kilometres.

I fished the Rooibos tea bag out of the tin cup, threw it into the blazing flames and listened to the hissing sound provoked by the two contrasting elements of fire and water. With a full belly, a full head and a full heart, I stared wearily into the flames of the campfire and let all the encounters pass before my mind’s eye again.

‘What a great day!’